+J.M.J.+
Under the Gun
by "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
Still with me on this one? I'm excited at the number of reviews I've gotten so far -- and I'm glad to find there are other people who are just as impressed with "Detective Story" as I am. But hang on, its gonna be a bumpy ride for Ash as he goes in deeper...
Before I get to that, a few words of thanks to the reviewers:
To Red_Queen (Love that handle!): Trinity is my all-time favorite "Matrix" character, too! (I even cropped my hair short in an attempt to look more like Carrie-Anne Moss...only to end up looking like the kid who plays Harry Potter in the movies!)
To Ryven: Thanks for asking me that question, as it's a very interesting one. When I drafted this story, I had figured "Detective Story" took place post-Neo. Then I bought the strategy guide for the "Enter the Matrix" computer game (I haven't bought the game itself yet, a bit expensive at this point) which includes a timeline of the "Matrix" universe back story up to "Matrix Reloaded". Turns out "Detective Story" takes place pre-Neo. We'll see how I resolve this issue...
To PadawanMage: I felt the same way about the film myself, that the ending left you hanging, which is exactly why I set out to write this fic, which has been challenging, keeping the right tone of voice, but so far it's working.
To chopsticks: I fixed the garbled line in the first chapter: thanks for spotting that! (I should have a beta reader for some of my stuff, but the one guy who could do it takes fooorrreeeevvveeeerrr to read any of my stuff) I'm amazed myself that I'm able to stay in character with the first-person narration (i.e., Ash's POV and tone, which is basically that of the typical film-noir/hard-boiled detective)
Disclaimer:
See chapter 1
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Chapter Two
Through the Looking Glass....
I opened my eyes on reddish black darkness, like the inside of your eyelids when you blink on a bright sunny day.
I tried to move, but something sticky was holding me in, as if I was inside the biggest overripe watermelon imaginable. I wrassled against the stickiness and forced myself to sit up.
A skin broke over my head. The snap hitting me across the eyes made me want to groan, but I couldn't. A muzzle of tubes and wires plugged my mouth like the worst gag imaginable.
I reached up and yanked on the gag, which tore away so suddenly I swore my tongue had gone with it.
I was mother-naked, sitting half submerged in... I don't know what it was. It *looked* like the biggest overripe watermelon imaginable if you scunned the skin off down to the pulp. I realized the skin of the thing was clear while the goop that surrounded me was red. Thick black cables bigger around than my thumb protruded from my arms and legs and torso as if they'd grown there.
I tried to crane my neck around to see where in hell I was, no easy task because the biggest great-grandmother of all coaxial cables stuck out of a socket in the back of my head.
To the left and the right, above and below, as far as I could see in either direction, more of those red pods bristled from a dull grey-black metal column. I could just make out the human occupants of the ones closest to me. Other columns just like it stood opposite. Electrical fields arced up and down the length of the columns, like some kind of generator in a mad-scientist's lab.
My brain tried to say it was too wierd to be real, that it had to be something in that wierd pill I took. But you know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction?
It only got stranger. From out of nowhere, this... metal spider-thing the size of a St. Bernard dropped down. It goggled at me with a dozen glowing reddish eyes, then grabbed me by the neck in its metal pincers. I expected it to choke the life out of me then and there, but with another set of pincers, it unlocked the cable at the back of my skull. The other cables attached to me whipped free.
The spider-robot let me go and darted away. A drain at the back of the pod opened. A tremendous suction force, like a giant vaccuum cleaner sucked me out of the pod and down some kind of waste tube.
* * * * * * *
I must have hit my head somewhere on the way down. I don't remember much after that. Someone must have fished me out, because I heard voices and sensed people moving about me, a woman's hands massaging my aching muscles. My head felt as if someone had caved it in with a cinderblock.
After a long time, which could have been a few hours or several days, I opened my eyes.
I lay on a metal-framed bunk covered with a worn but still sturdy mattress in a ship's cabin of some sort, the walls stripped down to the metal stringers and wiring. Someone had dressed me in a worn grey pullover jersey over a frayed thermal tee-shirt and grey fatigue pants tucked into calf-high boots.
I sat up, running a hand over my hair, to find it only about a quarter of an inch long. I got a good look at myself: I've always been a skinny fella, but I was scrawnier even than before.
The cabin door opened and a thin girl with short brown hair, squinting through coke-bottle thick metal rimmed glasses stuck her head in and looked at me. "Oh, you're awake," she said and went away. As she turned, I noticed she had, on the back of her head, a metal socket that was the twin to mine, except that hers protruded a little.
A moment later, she came back, with Morpheus at her side.
"You came through in one piece and you've awakened," he said.
"My head doesn't fell that way," I said, kneading my forehead. "Where am I? What is this place?"
"It's more a question of 'when' are you. You think you were living in the year 1949, but we've gone well past 2049."
"Gad, Rip Van Winkle," I thought out loud, with a trace of irony.
"Not quite," Morpheus replied. "The machines controlling the Matrix told you what year they wanted you to think it was. You're no older than when we found you."
"Twenty-eight in Matrix years," the girl said.
"But you've been in the real world for only twenty days," Morpheus said.
"So that means they had me in some kind of dream world?" I asked. That made some sense. But what the hell was it for?
I looked down at myself as I stood up. I swayed slightly as I walked to the door. Awful big baby, I thought with a smile at my own expense. The girl had caught my smile and replied in kind, but she looked away once she realized I was looking at her.
They led me into a narrow corridor, then down up ship's ladder to what was clearly the main deck.
"You're on board the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzer, one of a fleet of a dozen ships scouring these old mines and sewer lines and tunnels under the earth," Morpheus explained.
In the middle of the deck stood a half-circle bank of monitors hooked up to various towers and servers surrounded by a semicircle of what looked like battered dentist chairs with wires and monitors mounted on them. A lean, dark young man sat in the middle of the sprawl, typing on one of several keyboards, but he turned to look up at me, as did several other people at work around the sprawl.
Morpheus put a hand on the keyboard jockey's shoulder. "This is Tank, our operator, in charge of broadcasting our pirated signal and hacking into the Matrix." I recognized Jack, the short dark guy, and Zara the heavy girl, as well as Trinity, the three of them looking up from securing some wires to the wall by welding in support straps. A tall, almost queenly black woman stood slightly apart from the group of three. "That tall woman is Sand, our ship's medic."
"I've been seeing a lot of you these past few days," she said. "You took a good clout on the head, but you pulled through."
"I guess the hard work paid off," I said.
Morpheus glanced over my shoulder. I turned around and found the skinny girl looking at me with a shy look worthy of a twelve-year old schoolgirl. "And that little one behind you is Ref, the archivist," he concluded.
"Hey there," I said.
She dropped her gaze as soon as mine met hers, and gave me a demure little shrug. Make that a Catholic schoolgirl.
"You've probably been wanting some answers to your questions," Morpheus said, leading me toward the half-circle of chairs. "The answer is far from simple, but you're intelligent and strong enough to take it."
"You sure about that?" I asked.
He replied with a slight smile, a tough guy's smile, but even that didn't quite reassure me.
Jack and Trinity helped me into one of the chairs and set to work hooking wires into the sockets on my arms. Morpheus took charge of the cable that went into my head.
"This will feel a little odd," he said, and slotted the cable in through the head rest and into my head socket.
My ears popped and the world went white.
I seemed to be standing in a vast white walled room. The blindingly white light shone from overhead, casting no shadows. I couldn't see any walls for that matter, it was as if the space went on forever.
I looked down at myself to find I was wearing the same clothes I had worn before this madness had started, before... I had been unplugged.
"This is the Construct," Morpheus's deep voice said. I turned and found him standing behind me, clad in the black suit he must have been wearing under the regal coat he'd worn in the Matrix. "This is our training space, where we can upload most anything we need to train newly freed minds such as you how to defend themselves and mankind's last city against the machine army."
"But this ain't the Matrix?" I asked.
"No. We have control of this. I've met only one man who could exert any control over the Matrix, but you can learn how to bend that which once blinded you. But before you can start on that path, you first must know what brought mankind to this place."
He lead me toward a pair of red leather armchairs that had materialized, an old television set between them. He motioned to me to sit down in one, then sat down in the other and aimed a remote at the screen.
A white dot appeared in the middle of the screen. It spread out into an image of the city as I had known it, bright sky, tall buildings, traffic.
"The world as you knew it: prosperous, industrial, productive. That once was..." he said, speaking almost like a narrator of a newsreel.
The image vanished, replaced by an image of shattered towers, desolation, death, a black sky overhead. We seemed to move into the image, as if we'd stepped inside it somehow.
"Mankind discovered how to create machine intelligence, but he never dreamt, in his pride, that it would one day be his undoing," Morpheus continued.
The image changed again, then suddenly it seemed to... I dunno quite how to describe it.... It flowed out through the screen and plastered itself on the walls. Imagine watching a movie projected on a screen like a dome, that's what it was like. And it was NOT the kind of movie you'd want to see that way.
The narrative went on. Man built machines in his own likeness, including intelligent robots as cheap labor. They did their job so well, mankind started taking them for granted. Till one machine, B1-66-ER, tried to shrug off this kind of shabby treatment. When his owners wanted to shut him down permanently, he killed them in an act of -- as he claimed before the courts -- self-defense. The state condemned him to death -- or deactivation, or whatever you'd call it -- when his case went before the state supreme court, which in turn declared that an owner had the right to dispose of his property as he saw fit, even destroying it if he chose. And "property" of course included robots.
After that, the robots and their human sympathizers rose up, launching otherwise peaceful demonstrations which turned bloody when the anti-robot factions assaulted them. Violence broke out in the streets of several American cities as the two factions locked horns.
The government routinely rounded up scores of robots and destroyed them. One image burned itself into my mind: a human woman and her robot son -- some son of a gun had slashed the plastic skin on his face, showing the metal bones underneath -- being lead away by a group of soldiers surrounding them, the boy raising his hands in meek surrender.
But the machines retreated into an uninhabited stretch in the deserts of the Middle East where the humans never went, where they could start their own country, which they called 0 1 . They tried to gain admission the United Nations, but the humans wouldn't hear of it. They even put legal and economic sanctions on the country, even though it was producing technology that put the humans' stuff to shame.
It didn't take me long to put two and two together: Man beat up machines, machines retreated to lick their wounds. Machines try again, man clobbered them again. Man came up with some wild plan to "scorch the sky" by blowing ionized dust into the atmosphere to cut the machines off from the solar power they depended on. Machines fought back, defeating the human armies by sheer brute force... And they had another card up their processors: They'd found a way to harness the heat energy produced by the human body. That's how those people -- including me, until a few days ago -- came to be in those pod-things on those towers, or power-plants, rather. When the machine armies beat the crap out of the human armies, they offered man a no-questions asked treaty: surrender your flesh. They programmed the dream world of the Matrix to keep the human batteries plugged into the power plants quiet.
Mind you, I'm a tough guy. I've seen some pretty nasty stuff on some of the cases I've covered -- or at least the machines let me see some bad stuff -- but the things the machines enacted on the humans bugged me something awful. As the images stopped and the projection sank back into the television, I got up from my chair. Morpheus switched off the set and turned to me. I think he expected my reaction.
"Machines aren't smart enough to do that!" I snapped. "They're just... just machines!"
"Just as we are only human," Morpheus said.
"It's not true... It's all some kind of nightmare," I said. "I've seen enough."
"It *is* a terrible thing to discover. I didn't believe it either, until I went above ground and saw it with my own eyes," he said.
"Get me the hell out of here!" I growled.
That ear-popping sensation...
Jack undid the straps, but once I was free, I bolted from that chair, not sure which way to go. I was back on the Neb. but where was that?! I zigzagged, trying to find my way back to the cabin where I'd awakened. I didn't see that support stringer --
* * * * * * *
To be continued....
Afterword:
I described Ash's view inside the Matrix as being that of 1949; I know some people are going to question that, since the technology of his world is clearly similar to the 1990s: computers, the Internet, etc. But here's a few trivia bits which may justify the date I applied: The first computer programming language was invented by Lady Lovelace and the first experimental computer was the Difference Engine, a non-working model of which was designed by Charles Babbage back in the 1860s. Had his model worked, computers might have showed up a lot sooner, so the possibility of an Internet in the late 1940s is not entirely impossible. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote an excellent cyber/steampunk novel delving into this possible outcome, "The Difference Engine".
Under the Gun
by "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
Still with me on this one? I'm excited at the number of reviews I've gotten so far -- and I'm glad to find there are other people who are just as impressed with "Detective Story" as I am. But hang on, its gonna be a bumpy ride for Ash as he goes in deeper...
Before I get to that, a few words of thanks to the reviewers:
To Red_Queen (Love that handle!): Trinity is my all-time favorite "Matrix" character, too! (I even cropped my hair short in an attempt to look more like Carrie-Anne Moss...only to end up looking like the kid who plays Harry Potter in the movies!)
To Ryven: Thanks for asking me that question, as it's a very interesting one. When I drafted this story, I had figured "Detective Story" took place post-Neo. Then I bought the strategy guide for the "Enter the Matrix" computer game (I haven't bought the game itself yet, a bit expensive at this point) which includes a timeline of the "Matrix" universe back story up to "Matrix Reloaded". Turns out "Detective Story" takes place pre-Neo. We'll see how I resolve this issue...
To PadawanMage: I felt the same way about the film myself, that the ending left you hanging, which is exactly why I set out to write this fic, which has been challenging, keeping the right tone of voice, but so far it's working.
To chopsticks: I fixed the garbled line in the first chapter: thanks for spotting that! (I should have a beta reader for some of my stuff, but the one guy who could do it takes fooorrreeeevvveeeerrr to read any of my stuff) I'm amazed myself that I'm able to stay in character with the first-person narration (i.e., Ash's POV and tone, which is basically that of the typical film-noir/hard-boiled detective)
Disclaimer:
See chapter 1
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Chapter Two
Through the Looking Glass....
I opened my eyes on reddish black darkness, like the inside of your eyelids when you blink on a bright sunny day.
I tried to move, but something sticky was holding me in, as if I was inside the biggest overripe watermelon imaginable. I wrassled against the stickiness and forced myself to sit up.
A skin broke over my head. The snap hitting me across the eyes made me want to groan, but I couldn't. A muzzle of tubes and wires plugged my mouth like the worst gag imaginable.
I reached up and yanked on the gag, which tore away so suddenly I swore my tongue had gone with it.
I was mother-naked, sitting half submerged in... I don't know what it was. It *looked* like the biggest overripe watermelon imaginable if you scunned the skin off down to the pulp. I realized the skin of the thing was clear while the goop that surrounded me was red. Thick black cables bigger around than my thumb protruded from my arms and legs and torso as if they'd grown there.
I tried to crane my neck around to see where in hell I was, no easy task because the biggest great-grandmother of all coaxial cables stuck out of a socket in the back of my head.
To the left and the right, above and below, as far as I could see in either direction, more of those red pods bristled from a dull grey-black metal column. I could just make out the human occupants of the ones closest to me. Other columns just like it stood opposite. Electrical fields arced up and down the length of the columns, like some kind of generator in a mad-scientist's lab.
My brain tried to say it was too wierd to be real, that it had to be something in that wierd pill I took. But you know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction?
It only got stranger. From out of nowhere, this... metal spider-thing the size of a St. Bernard dropped down. It goggled at me with a dozen glowing reddish eyes, then grabbed me by the neck in its metal pincers. I expected it to choke the life out of me then and there, but with another set of pincers, it unlocked the cable at the back of my skull. The other cables attached to me whipped free.
The spider-robot let me go and darted away. A drain at the back of the pod opened. A tremendous suction force, like a giant vaccuum cleaner sucked me out of the pod and down some kind of waste tube.
* * * * * * *
I must have hit my head somewhere on the way down. I don't remember much after that. Someone must have fished me out, because I heard voices and sensed people moving about me, a woman's hands massaging my aching muscles. My head felt as if someone had caved it in with a cinderblock.
After a long time, which could have been a few hours or several days, I opened my eyes.
I lay on a metal-framed bunk covered with a worn but still sturdy mattress in a ship's cabin of some sort, the walls stripped down to the metal stringers and wiring. Someone had dressed me in a worn grey pullover jersey over a frayed thermal tee-shirt and grey fatigue pants tucked into calf-high boots.
I sat up, running a hand over my hair, to find it only about a quarter of an inch long. I got a good look at myself: I've always been a skinny fella, but I was scrawnier even than before.
The cabin door opened and a thin girl with short brown hair, squinting through coke-bottle thick metal rimmed glasses stuck her head in and looked at me. "Oh, you're awake," she said and went away. As she turned, I noticed she had, on the back of her head, a metal socket that was the twin to mine, except that hers protruded a little.
A moment later, she came back, with Morpheus at her side.
"You came through in one piece and you've awakened," he said.
"My head doesn't fell that way," I said, kneading my forehead. "Where am I? What is this place?"
"It's more a question of 'when' are you. You think you were living in the year 1949, but we've gone well past 2049."
"Gad, Rip Van Winkle," I thought out loud, with a trace of irony.
"Not quite," Morpheus replied. "The machines controlling the Matrix told you what year they wanted you to think it was. You're no older than when we found you."
"Twenty-eight in Matrix years," the girl said.
"But you've been in the real world for only twenty days," Morpheus said.
"So that means they had me in some kind of dream world?" I asked. That made some sense. But what the hell was it for?
I looked down at myself as I stood up. I swayed slightly as I walked to the door. Awful big baby, I thought with a smile at my own expense. The girl had caught my smile and replied in kind, but she looked away once she realized I was looking at her.
They led me into a narrow corridor, then down up ship's ladder to what was clearly the main deck.
"You're on board the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzer, one of a fleet of a dozen ships scouring these old mines and sewer lines and tunnels under the earth," Morpheus explained.
In the middle of the deck stood a half-circle bank of monitors hooked up to various towers and servers surrounded by a semicircle of what looked like battered dentist chairs with wires and monitors mounted on them. A lean, dark young man sat in the middle of the sprawl, typing on one of several keyboards, but he turned to look up at me, as did several other people at work around the sprawl.
Morpheus put a hand on the keyboard jockey's shoulder. "This is Tank, our operator, in charge of broadcasting our pirated signal and hacking into the Matrix." I recognized Jack, the short dark guy, and Zara the heavy girl, as well as Trinity, the three of them looking up from securing some wires to the wall by welding in support straps. A tall, almost queenly black woman stood slightly apart from the group of three. "That tall woman is Sand, our ship's medic."
"I've been seeing a lot of you these past few days," she said. "You took a good clout on the head, but you pulled through."
"I guess the hard work paid off," I said.
Morpheus glanced over my shoulder. I turned around and found the skinny girl looking at me with a shy look worthy of a twelve-year old schoolgirl. "And that little one behind you is Ref, the archivist," he concluded.
"Hey there," I said.
She dropped her gaze as soon as mine met hers, and gave me a demure little shrug. Make that a Catholic schoolgirl.
"You've probably been wanting some answers to your questions," Morpheus said, leading me toward the half-circle of chairs. "The answer is far from simple, but you're intelligent and strong enough to take it."
"You sure about that?" I asked.
He replied with a slight smile, a tough guy's smile, but even that didn't quite reassure me.
Jack and Trinity helped me into one of the chairs and set to work hooking wires into the sockets on my arms. Morpheus took charge of the cable that went into my head.
"This will feel a little odd," he said, and slotted the cable in through the head rest and into my head socket.
My ears popped and the world went white.
I seemed to be standing in a vast white walled room. The blindingly white light shone from overhead, casting no shadows. I couldn't see any walls for that matter, it was as if the space went on forever.
I looked down at myself to find I was wearing the same clothes I had worn before this madness had started, before... I had been unplugged.
"This is the Construct," Morpheus's deep voice said. I turned and found him standing behind me, clad in the black suit he must have been wearing under the regal coat he'd worn in the Matrix. "This is our training space, where we can upload most anything we need to train newly freed minds such as you how to defend themselves and mankind's last city against the machine army."
"But this ain't the Matrix?" I asked.
"No. We have control of this. I've met only one man who could exert any control over the Matrix, but you can learn how to bend that which once blinded you. But before you can start on that path, you first must know what brought mankind to this place."
He lead me toward a pair of red leather armchairs that had materialized, an old television set between them. He motioned to me to sit down in one, then sat down in the other and aimed a remote at the screen.
A white dot appeared in the middle of the screen. It spread out into an image of the city as I had known it, bright sky, tall buildings, traffic.
"The world as you knew it: prosperous, industrial, productive. That once was..." he said, speaking almost like a narrator of a newsreel.
The image vanished, replaced by an image of shattered towers, desolation, death, a black sky overhead. We seemed to move into the image, as if we'd stepped inside it somehow.
"Mankind discovered how to create machine intelligence, but he never dreamt, in his pride, that it would one day be his undoing," Morpheus continued.
The image changed again, then suddenly it seemed to... I dunno quite how to describe it.... It flowed out through the screen and plastered itself on the walls. Imagine watching a movie projected on a screen like a dome, that's what it was like. And it was NOT the kind of movie you'd want to see that way.
The narrative went on. Man built machines in his own likeness, including intelligent robots as cheap labor. They did their job so well, mankind started taking them for granted. Till one machine, B1-66-ER, tried to shrug off this kind of shabby treatment. When his owners wanted to shut him down permanently, he killed them in an act of -- as he claimed before the courts -- self-defense. The state condemned him to death -- or deactivation, or whatever you'd call it -- when his case went before the state supreme court, which in turn declared that an owner had the right to dispose of his property as he saw fit, even destroying it if he chose. And "property" of course included robots.
After that, the robots and their human sympathizers rose up, launching otherwise peaceful demonstrations which turned bloody when the anti-robot factions assaulted them. Violence broke out in the streets of several American cities as the two factions locked horns.
The government routinely rounded up scores of robots and destroyed them. One image burned itself into my mind: a human woman and her robot son -- some son of a gun had slashed the plastic skin on his face, showing the metal bones underneath -- being lead away by a group of soldiers surrounding them, the boy raising his hands in meek surrender.
But the machines retreated into an uninhabited stretch in the deserts of the Middle East where the humans never went, where they could start their own country, which they called 0 1 . They tried to gain admission the United Nations, but the humans wouldn't hear of it. They even put legal and economic sanctions on the country, even though it was producing technology that put the humans' stuff to shame.
It didn't take me long to put two and two together: Man beat up machines, machines retreated to lick their wounds. Machines try again, man clobbered them again. Man came up with some wild plan to "scorch the sky" by blowing ionized dust into the atmosphere to cut the machines off from the solar power they depended on. Machines fought back, defeating the human armies by sheer brute force... And they had another card up their processors: They'd found a way to harness the heat energy produced by the human body. That's how those people -- including me, until a few days ago -- came to be in those pod-things on those towers, or power-plants, rather. When the machine armies beat the crap out of the human armies, they offered man a no-questions asked treaty: surrender your flesh. They programmed the dream world of the Matrix to keep the human batteries plugged into the power plants quiet.
Mind you, I'm a tough guy. I've seen some pretty nasty stuff on some of the cases I've covered -- or at least the machines let me see some bad stuff -- but the things the machines enacted on the humans bugged me something awful. As the images stopped and the projection sank back into the television, I got up from my chair. Morpheus switched off the set and turned to me. I think he expected my reaction.
"Machines aren't smart enough to do that!" I snapped. "They're just... just machines!"
"Just as we are only human," Morpheus said.
"It's not true... It's all some kind of nightmare," I said. "I've seen enough."
"It *is* a terrible thing to discover. I didn't believe it either, until I went above ground and saw it with my own eyes," he said.
"Get me the hell out of here!" I growled.
That ear-popping sensation...
Jack undid the straps, but once I was free, I bolted from that chair, not sure which way to go. I was back on the Neb. but where was that?! I zigzagged, trying to find my way back to the cabin where I'd awakened. I didn't see that support stringer --
* * * * * * *
To be continued....
Afterword:
I described Ash's view inside the Matrix as being that of 1949; I know some people are going to question that, since the technology of his world is clearly similar to the 1990s: computers, the Internet, etc. But here's a few trivia bits which may justify the date I applied: The first computer programming language was invented by Lady Lovelace and the first experimental computer was the Difference Engine, a non-working model of which was designed by Charles Babbage back in the 1860s. Had his model worked, computers might have showed up a lot sooner, so the possibility of an Internet in the late 1940s is not entirely impossible. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote an excellent cyber/steampunk novel delving into this possible outcome, "The Difference Engine".
