J.M.J.
Under the Gun
by "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
Sorry it took me a while to get this typed: I was going crazy last week trying to find the parts I needed for the Trinity costume I wore to WorldCon, the convention for the World Science Fiction Society. But... here, at length, is the last chapter of this fic, which I only just finished extensively revising for length and content. An idea came to me that was too wild to keep to myself and it begged to be included to have this story end on a high, ringing, clanging note.
But first, a few words of thanks to all my reviewers and patient readers:
To Lady Smith: Wow! one of the most enthusiastic reviews I've ever gooten! Thanks! Re: the Mero/Ref scene -- this was originally a bit longer, and I did get into Ref's emotional reaction to the attack, but I thought it started to get a bit maudlin, so I cut that part... If this had been a movie version, the shot of the Merv leaning over Ref and pinning her to the floor would have been rendered all in Matrix code, like the shot where Smith takes over the Oracle's awareness. (and that little glitch re: Ref knowing about different versions of the Matrix -- it's either an accidental oversight on my part, or Morpheus may have passed on what Smith told him about the first Matrix having been a perfect world.) Re: including the name "Lambert" in the Mero's alias -- I think one of the real Merovingian kings of France (they reigned waaay back in the 500s through the 700s A.D.) was named Lambord, and that's pretty dang close to Lambert, so close it was definately eye-brow-raising. And re: the claiming ceremony -- I actually got the idea from Frank Herbert's original "Dune" novel, and I had a feeling the Zion dwellers would most likely have a similar ceremony in their funeral rites, since they're a closely-knit, technologically advanced tribal community. I remember a comment in "The Art of the Matrix", the coffee table-sized art book with tons of sketches and storyboards from the first film, that the clothes the Neb crew wear have clearly had more than one owner, so my mind reasoned that it was highly likely that the spare clothing of someone who died in service might be claimed by family members or fellow crew-members. There's even one bit in "Enter the Martix" when Sparks asks Ghost that if anything happens to him (Ghost) "Can I claim your boots?" (Feel free to borrow it! or even "claim" it! ;8) )
To kraeg001: It's kinda pre-Reloaded, maybe about a year before (I haven't heard how much time has passed since the end of "The Matrix" and "Reloaded" but I'm guessing it's a couple of years). The "Peaquod", as the name of a ship was borrowed from one of the "Matrix" comics on the website, but the Charlemagne was an idea that came off the top of my head (for that matter, Charlemagne's great-grandfather Charles Martell lead a quiet, fairly bloodless revolution against the last of the Merovingian kings of France. Yep, I done my homework on a lot of the references in the films!)
To just64helpin: Yeah, I just found out on this website I stumbled on, "The Matrix Character Database" (a MUST bookmark for any self-respecting "Matrix" fanfic writer) that there are two more ships that don't even get mentioned in the film, but were mentioned in the schematic drawings for the Zion dock: the "Vishnu" and the "Ganesha".
To GeneticallyElvenGryffindor: ::Blushing:: Thanks! I have to admit, Ash's head has been a great place to get inside, and I'm considering writing a sequel to this.
Disclaimer:
See chapter 1
Chapter Nine: Waking
I guess my reassurances paid off: Ref was up and about the next morning, limping a little, but otherwise usual busy self, checking the disks containing the data she'd collected.
"I'm afraid this wasn't my most productive run," she admitted to Hamann.
"Every run that you make is productive," he said. "Doesn't matter how much you bring back, as long as it adds to the Archive. You'll do better next time."
Ref looked up at me. "I'm gonna upload these files into the server; you want to come along?"
"Sure thing: it'll help me get a feel for the place," I said.
On the way to the archive, she gave me the ten-dollar tour: first stop, the engineering level, with the heavy machinery that filtered the air and the water supply as well as processing waste to be used as fertilizer on the next level down, which house the hydroponic gardens: the food crops were grown here, while another large chamber housed the vats where they grew that lovely single-cell protein.
At length, she led me to a room underneath the Temple, a natural cave blocked up with a door that belonged on a bomb shelter. She typed some kind of pass-code on a numeric keypad set into the rock beside the door, then drew me back as something buzed deep inside the door frame. The door swung out on its hinges, opening wide enough for us to step through, she led me inside and paused to close the door.
"Y' can't be too careful," I said.
"Nope. If the machines knew what kind of stuff we had down here, they'd send a squiddie with my name on it after me," she said.
I have to admit, I almost made a joke about the French guy sending his goons after her, but I wisely kept that under my hat.
She led me down a short corridor that opened out into a room with several padded chairs similar to the ones on the Neb, each with a harness of wires connected to a port along one wall; along the other stood several workstations. She led me through that room into the next; along the walls in this next room stood several servers, eached labelled like the wings of a library: "Music", "World History", "Art Gallery".
She brought me to the very back of the room, where another of those chairs stood before a work station. She turned on the computer, and once it had booted up, she set to work loading one disk after another into it, transferring the files.
"So this is it? This is how you earn your keep?" I asked.
"This is part of it," she said, looking up at me with a smile. "This is what I live to do."
I perched my hip on the edge of the desk, watching. "Okay... now how do you access the files, jacking in?"
"That's one way, the way the freed minds access it; you probably noticed the workstations out there..."
"And those are for the Zion-born?" I asked.
"You got it. You don't miss anything."
I shrugged. "Comes with being a detective."
Once she loaded the last disk, she put the workstation on hibernation and led me out of the Archive chambers.
"Is that all you have to do?" I asked.
"No, I still have to jack in and finish cataloging the new items," she said. "I can do that from the privacy of my own personal processing unit, back in my room."
"Wow, that's convenient," I said.
She led the way back to Hammann's rooms; once we'd gotten back there she led me to her nook and took down something that looked like an especially thick notebook computer with a couple cables sticking out of it, down from a shelf over the bed. She patted the mattress beside her as she sat down. I sat myself down beside her as she set the unit on the mattress, then pressed a few buttons on the top of the thing.
"Now if you'll just lay down, I'll jack you in," she said. I lay back on my side, letting her lean over me as she slotted the business end of the cable into my head jack.
Everything went grey for a second, then I found myself standing in a garden shaded by tall pines and laurel trees. Ref stood at my side clad in one of those flowing gowns you see on Greek statues (well, the ones with clothes on them). I looked down to find myself still wearing my 1940s duds.
"Oops!" Ref said, "Wrong template! Hold on, I'll be back."
She disappeared in a cloud of greenish code. A moment later, she came back dressed in an almost teasingly librarian-ish blouse and skirt. Everything around us changed from a garden to an Art-Deco terrace leading to a building of concrete and glass with chrome accents, which I guessed was the Archive.
"Is this more like it?" she asked.
"Yeah, thanks," I said. "How'd you do that?"
"I jacked out long enough to change the template. That Greek garden is the current default: I'm one of those types who like to change the interface template a lot," she said, leading the way up the terrace.
"Hey, if it's your space and you can do what you want with it, who's to stop you from re-decorating when the mood strikes?" I said.
The front doors of the building opened at our approach. We stepped out of the simulated sunlight into the cool of the interior. She took me by the hand and led the way through the Archives.
I got the twenty-dollar tour that time: she showed me the art gallery, in one wing; the library in another, the video library in a third. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I didn't expect it to have a third of the stuff it housed. It was almost too much to take in at once, but I guess that's the nature of it.
"Now, you didn't collect all this stuff yourself, did you?" I asked.
"No, not at all. There's been several generations of archivists who've tended this place," she said. "I've added only a teeny fraction of what's here."
She said this humbly and sincerely, like she knew clearly what kind of responsibility she'd had handed to her when they gave her this job.
She led me through a set of double doors marked "Archivists Only", into what was obviously the administrative wing. "VIP access," she said, smiling.
"Helps to have friends in high places," I said, nonchalant.
All at once, an alarm bell started ringing and a siren blared somewhere deeper in the wing. I jumped at the racket, looking up and around me.
"Virus alert," she said, taking me by the hand and hustling me out onto the front terrace...
A moment later, I sat up, Ref pulling the cable from her own jack and removing mine.
"Something happened to you inside the Matrix," she said, loojking at me.
"Why, what makes you think that?" I asked, puzzled.
"The alarm stopped as soon as you jacked out," she said.
"Wait... that Agent..."
"What Agent?"
"When we jacked out after Jack and I saved you, this Agent came out of nowhere and tried sticking his hand into me," I said. "It was like he was trying to infect me."
She put her hand on my wrist. "I'm going out to find help; wait here."
Maybe I was just getting paranoid, but I got a bad feeling about this...
It was almost like that nightmare about the eye examination from hell that I'd had before Trinity found me. A bunch of techs from Zion Command Central's technical division jacked me into a construct, then started probing my brain from the inside and out. Some of them even jacked in and ran virual scans on me. It all hurt like hell, worse than a hot needle stabbed into my head jack.
When the techs had finished with me, they let Ref and Hammann come into the room where I lay still strapped down on an operating table. Hammann held back for a moment while Ref appraoched me first. She hugged me around the neck and leaned down to kiss me. Much as the effort made my head ache even worse, I reached up and kissed her back.
"You here to give me the bad news?" I asked, looking over Ref's shoulder at Hammann.
"Well, so far, they're sayin' your avatar is a bundle of messed-up code. A virus tried to attack you, but you're bucking it. The real problem is, you read like an Agent," he explained.
"Tank pointed out that Agent on top of us when we jacked out after we brought you to the Oracle," Ref pointed out. "There wasn't any."
Hammann dropped his gaze, a clear sign he had some worse news to share. "I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but I'm afraid they're likely to send you back up there."
Ref bit her lip and turned her face away. I tried to sit up. "What?! You mean I've come this far...." I let the words fade in my throat.
"I'm sorry, Ash. You showed a lot of promise. But we have to take precautions to protect you and protect ourselves as well," Hammann said. "Every time you jacked in on a mission, you'd catche the machines' attention. You'd be a sitting duck for them to go after."
"A sleeper, in other words," I said, thinking out loud.
"That's what they're calling it," Hammann said. "I don't want to see you go, but I'm afraid this is how things are done here."
"But what if I don't want to go back," I said. "You can't force me to."
"We aren't trying to cause problems for you," he said. "But we are trying to protect you from yourself and protect ourselves from what the machines would do to us through you."
Even in the read world, I was still a pawn of the machines...
"If you send him back, you'll have to send me back with him," Ref said, her fists doubled, her voice hard like the stone walls around us.
Hammann looked at us both, his face solemn, even sad. "I'll see what I can do, but I'm afraid I can't make any guarantees either way."
With that, he went out of the room, closing the metal door behind him.
I looked up at Ref. "Please don't do this, Ref," I said.
She leaned over me again, holding me. "I have to do this. I love you."
"But you've got your work to take care of.... Did you ever finish those uploads you had to do?"
"Yeah, but it wasn't easy. I was worrying about you the whole time. Maybe it's just the after-effects of what happened to me last time I jacked in, but I felt tired and a bit nauseous."
"Probably just what happened to you back in the Matrix," I said.
I felt tired fromall the poking and prying into my head. I lay back on the operating table. Ref perched herself on a tall metal stool at my head, then reached down and put her arm under my head, supporting it.
I must have dozed off: next thing I knew, someone nudged me awake. I opened my eyes and looked up to find Morpheus standing over me.
"What's the verdict?" I asked.
"You are going to be brought back to the surface, where you will be sedated and placed where the machines can find you. It will happen too quickly for you to remember it," he said. He kept his usual solemnly calm demeanor, but I could tell he hated having to break the bad tidings to me.
"You will be taken to the surface on board the Logos. Captain Niobe and her crew will see that you make the transition smoothly," he said. He clearly trusted Niobe, but he didn't trust himself to do the job. The prospect scared me stiff -- what the hell was gonna happen to me next? -- but I felt bad for him as well.
I had plenty of time to mull over what lay ahead as the Logos sped through the tunnels leading to the surface. Ironic: I'd had to go up to the surface to get the convincer I needed in order to find out the worst of the awful reality. Now, things had almost gotten too real, so they had to take me back to the dreamworld where I'd come from.
Captain Niobe, a tiny woman who looked like she stood all of five feet tall, but who packed a "don't mess with me" attitude I didn't want to feel the brunt of, ordered me confined to quarters. Sparks, their operator, came down once bringing my "last meal", a roll of bread and a tin bowl of clear soup.
"I've heard about people being sent back, but I've never actually seen it done," Sparks said, setting the tray on the metal stool beside the bunk where I lay. "It's something the Academy teaches to operators like me, but it's like an earthquake drill: You're doing it with the intention that you don't actually have to do it someday... but here were are doing it."
I sat up and looked Sparks in the eye. "Sparks, can you do me one favor right now?"
"I was about to ask you if you had any last requests," Sparks said.
"Just let me eat this in peace," I said.
"Your wish is my backslash-colon-execute-command," he said, with a phony little bow and went out.
Some minutes later, he came back to collect the tray, but thank goodness he kept his mouth shut this time.
It dawned on me why the third detective had gone crazy: the guy who disappeared had been unplugged. The guy who suicided must have taken the blue pill and it had poisoned him (accidently or on purpose). But Clarence, the third guy, must have been reinserted into the Matrix, and the machines had done a number on his brain to keep him from blabbing to everyone about what was really going on.
My bladder almost lost it when it dawned on me what was about to happen...
I thought I heard a light footstep in the hallway; I stiffened, waiting for the steps to pause before the closed door, but they went on their way.
A moment later, I heard more footsteps, heavier ones that belonged to Sparks, approach and stop at the door. The moment of truth -- or was it the moment of lies? -- had arrived.
I got up as the door opened. Sparks stood out there, with Ghost, the first mate, a small, chin-bearded Asian guy equally as quiet as a ghost. They lead me to the sickbay where they had me strip down completely and pile my clothes on the floor before they strapped me down on the table. Ghost shaved my head while Sparks set to work filling a large syringe from a jar of what I took to be the sedative.
"Any last words?" Sparks asked.
"If you see Ref... tell her I said goodbye... tell her I love her..." I said, turning my gaze away to keep my heart from overflowing.
"I will tell her this," Ghost said.
Sparks approached me and inserted the needle into my arm jack. "Breathe deeply now. It won't take long." He depressed the plunger, shooting the stuff into me... I breathed deeply, my breaths coming ragged, my heart hammering in my chest.
Then something lunged out of the doorway behind Sparks and knocked him to the floor. The syringe dropped from my arm and I heard it smash. My head had started to feel light and the lights had gotten fuzzy. I heard the sounds of a scuffle but it seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel.
Everything gets really hazy after that. I heard a lot of yelling and the sound of an alarm going off. Then everything went dark, but I somehow stayed awake in the darkness. Or else I was dreaming, but in the dream, it felt like I was flying blinded, battling winds buffeting me about, sending me tumbling end over end, forcing me sidewise. I hit bottom somewhere. I heard confused movement and a flurry of blurred sounds all about me. Something snatched me up and hauled me away. I tried to fight it, but whatever it was felt inexorable. This must be the machines taking me away, I thought, not so much in words, but more like a raw idea that rose in my head. I tried to fight it off like a tiger, a blind tiger but a desperate one.
"Ow! Dammit, Ash, lay off; you'll kill me!" An older man's voice spoke out of the blackness. I forced my eyes open and I looked up into a blurry mass of flesh-color and blue that slowly resolved itself into Hammann's face. I had my hands around his throat, though I barely felt it, but he had me pinned down hard on the bed where I lay.
"What... where...?" I choked out, my numb grip on him loosening.
He took my hands from his throat and laid them on the mattress at my sides. "It's all right: you're back in Zion. Ref stowed away on the Logos; she stopped Sparks from shooting about half the sedative into you, but then they had some company come to call: squiddies attacked the ship. Niobe managed to steer out of there before they breached the hull. Still, they took a bad hit: no place to go except back to Zion, with the Novalis towing them. Looks like you got a second chance: there's a fellow here who's sticking up for you, goes by the name Dashiel, used to be a detective himself, at least before he found out the truth."
"He wouldn't happen to have trailed a cybercriminal named Trinity, would he?" I asked.
"As a matter of fact, I did," said a lanky man with greying platinum blonde hair, coming out of the far corner of the room.
I sat up, propping myself on my elbow, the one that didn't ache. "You're the first guy who went after Trinity?" I asked.
Dashiel nodded. "Yes, I am. I only just heard about you: I've been training in City Defense, and the word about you hadn't gotten around. Trinity told me everything about what's happened to you."
"Did you have the same sort of trouble with your... code?" I asked.
"Not exactly. It was never scanned thoroughly, but there again, I haven't jacked into any constructs of any kind since I was freed." He glanced at Hammann, as if quietly asking permission to add something; Hammann nodded slowly. "The Zion Council is going to examine our cases and figure out what to do about it."
"Hopefully, it'll be a case of 'If it ain't broken, don't fix it'," Hammann said. "There's other jobs to be done here besides going back up there."
A few days later, the question went before the Council. In the meantime, Ref had been removed from the Neb's crew on insubordination and attacking two fleet officers; still, I had the feeling Hammann would put in a word to get her back on the crew.
The Council questioned the techs that had examined Dashiel's code and mine before they questioned us. Since we were perfectly fine in the real world and only jacking into the Matrix posed any possible hazards, they ruled that we could stay in the real world, but we were automatically disqualified for applying to the Zion Hovercraft Fleet. That didn't faze me, really: too many bugs up there. Only trouble was, I wouldn't be able to help Ref when-if she got her job back collecting more items.
As Hammann and I left the Council chamber, we met Trinity in the hallway.
"So they let you stay," she said with a slight smile.
"Yeah... but I have to thank you for it, just I have to thank you for unplugging me."
"I just did what needed to be done," she said. She glanced at Hammann, who waited in the hallway a few steps ahead of me. "You'd better get going. Ref will be looking for you."
"And I'm looking forward to seeing her again... Trinity?" I asked, as she started to turn away.
"Yes?"
I dropped my gaze to my boot toes. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"Wel... I kinda had an eye on you, not that way really... I guess it was because you freed my mind."
"It's all right. I noticed." She clearly didn't let it bother her that she had.
I turned away and followed Hamann back to his family's rooms.
A month later, Ref and I were "pair-bonded", as they call gettin' hitched here in Zion. Hamann helped us find a love-nest of our own; I've been shuttling back and forth to it ever since I started training as a City Defender at the Academy. But I do manage to find the time to help Ref with the Archive, as best as I can.
Ref ran two collection missions in the space of a month, before she started having fits of nausea and trouble keeping that single-cell goop down. At first, Sand thought my girl had caught a flu bug, but it turned out to be something else.
Turns out Ref caught the bug from me, you might say. I'm gonna be a family man, which came as a complete surprise to me. Guess you might say I went from being like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe to being Nick Charles to my wife's Nora; Ref even calls me "the Thin Man" as a nickname. ...But let's hope this world quiets down and this war ends for the better, so our kid can have a safe place to live in.
The End
Afterword:
There's a very slim outside chance that I may write a sequel to this, once I finish with some other ideas I'm tinkering with. If the sequel does get written, it'll be set about 14 years after "Revolutions" and it will feature Ash and Ref's son Blaze... and you'll find out just why the Merovingian was so adamant about getting that sword Ref bought at the art auction... Stay tuned...
