12-11-97
A sentinel scare and events immediately prior to it had inspired Morpheus to leave the ship running silent. For the first time in years, every last member of his crew was resting alone in his or her respective bed. Because they trusted his judgment and respected his right to have a moment of silence. Apoc had gone back to his old cabin, sleeping without Switch for the first night in a long while, though not as long as Morpheus would have preferred. Trinity was sleeping alone for the precise reasons that left him awake in a dormant ship. Everyone else was alone as a matter of course.
He'd lost another man in the Matrix today. Today, I have lost a life. It was never impersonal for him, no matter how it seemed to the other members of his crew. To them, he displayed unflagging will, perseverance, and belief. On his own, he mourned each life that passed on as a result of his inadequacy. It wasn't arrogance to say he was one of the greatest-certainly one of the most famous-rebels ever to plague the Matrix. However, he was insignificant; the man he would find would make his miraculous escapes and infamous escapades obsolete.
All he had found was death. He had begun his pursuit in earnest with the acquisition of a new ship, filling out her crew with his recruits, save for Trinity, who had followed him from the Mjolnir. Tank and Dozer were fresh from Zion-just the right sort: malleable. It had taken ten years to pull the rest of current roster, starting with Cypher, followed shortly by Switch, Apoc, Binary and Ajax-who'd left as soon as both of them realized that there was no chance of displacing Trinity as second-in-command; they fought for that honor and responsibility on the Vigilant now. Mouse had been the most recent permanent addition. Binary and Ajax were the only ones of his select few he'd lost to other ships. Save for Niobe. But, a traitorous, self-pitying voice whined in his mind, did you ever really have her to lose? He dislodged it. He'd lost plenty as was.
Which was his problem, his purpose for mourning now. Five. There were more than that, but today he mourned five, four old, one fresh. Five good soldiers and not one deserved what he or she got. He'd waited-he'd waited until he was ready, making sure his numbers could support, protect, and encourage the One, through simple human camaraderie if nothing else. If you build it, he will come, went the refrain in his head. What of it? One by one, they came and failed. He'd tried to change it up this time, and fate had snatched away one more member of his crew.
Niobe had seen two of them go before she'd left, her words present in the stillness, taking the place of his conscience. You believe something, and that's fine. You just don't know when to stop believing. Things don't happen in the real world because you want them to happen. You can't change people, Morpheus, you can't make them what they're not. Why the hell do you think there are over six billion people still plugged into the Matrix?
She was right, one of her most endearing and aggravating traits, especially to one so used to being right himself. For Niobe, it was simple: life or death, pushing versus pushing too hard, faith versus zealotry. It had never been so easy for him. Years ago, he escaped the Matrix seeking the truth, wanting to incorporate the two halves of his soul that had, in the Matrix's false reality, always threatened to tear his mind apart. The real world was a salve that preserved his sanity, that told him that his senses weren't lying to him and yet were, and that both conditions could exist concurrently.
How could he not believe the Oracle when she gave him the singular honor of finding the hero who would do for the world what could thus far be done only one mind at a time? And only then with the combined efforts of many people? Her words were those he lived by, they were his purpose. His purpose was to find the One, the One's to free humanity and end the Matrix. His insight, his disciple-the term wounded him now, but that was how he'd thought of it in the beginning-would lead to the ultimate freedom of humanity from a century of enslavement.
This is the price the dreamers pay. Morpheus sat up in his loading chair. It was time. He hoisted himself up to his feet and strode over to a recessed area where a solitary body lay covered with a gray wool blanket. You began and ended your life in the real world in those blankets if you were a soldier. Reborn naked, a crew brought you inside, wrapped you to prevent hypothermia; dead, that blanket was your shroud. This was no mere metaphor, it was a reality; the blanket used to clothe your real body in its first moments of paralyzed weakness remained with you until you needed it no longer. And you never knew who'd had it before strong hands wrapped it around your exposed flesh. You only knew they were dead.
Like Lucid.
How did I fail? This was as important to Morpheus as the recognition of his failure. Success was predicated on learning from past mistakes. Each time he thought he'd found someone who could be the One, each time he had failed, he altered his pattern. The first time out, he took the best-dynamite code breaker, young, eager, aware-and trained him to be better still. When first he spoke the words of prophecy, heard himself promise destiny to another, there had been only anticipation. The One would be he who pushed himself to a level from which he could not return. Unmatched.
Achilles had not been the One.
His first lost candidate he bore in stride, holding to hope, inwardly swearing revenge on the Agents who'd countered Achilles' courage with death. Morpheus altered his methods, still seeking the best, just shifting the grounds of assessment. There had been a report of an aberration whereby a talented athlete had altered his consciousness, nearly escaping into the real world, sheerly because of his will to succeed. He explored this possibility; if a person could wake himself up, it meant there was something unique to this person, unseen by the Resistance before and possibly ever after. An ability that could not be explained away.
Marathon had not been the One either.
If it was not intelligence, nor a prowess that granted special abilities, perhaps it took a greater mind, one more concerned with possibilities rather than realities. Imagination. A fundamental trait easily identifiable in all recruits, closely associated with age-you had to catch the recruit at a point in his or her life where dreams were still real, possibilities were infinite, and limitations nonexistent. You needed a dreamer to lead a people. Imaginative people were not bound to the forms presented to them, and thus, the One reincarnated would possess a mind capable of transitioning between vastly different forms. Or genders, for that matter.
But Kassandra had not been the One.
Frustrated by his failure to save her life, Morpheus turned inward on his admittedly zealous faith to find that it was all that could sustain him when all else threatened to overwhelm him. Faith. The answer seemed too simple to not have been overlooked. It took great faith to believe in God or many gods in a real or simulated world full of so much horror, pain, and-closest to home-death. Like Marathon willing himself to freedom, Morpheus expected belief would carry this recruit as it carried him.
Pius had not been the One.
The defeat of faith caused his own spiritual crisis. It was the only time he could recall Trinity fearing for him, though she would not dare voice it. She feared next to nothing. Were it not for her assurances-and out and out stubborn refusal to consider such a thing-he might have suspected her to have been the One, hiding under his nose all along. She denied it, however, and he believed her.
"Lucid," Morpheus rumbled. He always performed this personal goodbye aloud, out of respect, a testimony to how much they kept locked away, unsaid. "Lucid, I was wrong. I gave you false hope and never told you why." The dead never answered back, not in recrimination, nor acceptance. "Your life is debt I owe and can never repay. I accept responsibility.
"All life is precious. I have tried to be sure that no life entrusted to my care is wasted. If ever you felt that way, I apologize for your loss." The words might have sounded odd to anyone else, but they spoke the truth in his soul. "It is hollow to stand here in vigil over the fifth life to be lost to my crusade and promise that I shall never allow this to happen again. I am sorry, Lucid, I am no longer so hopeful as that. I can only pray that you understand my reasoning and forgive me in such time as we might meet again.
"I freed you for mediocrity's sake, Lucid." Again, the words sounded harsh, as if they might dishonor the dead; Morpheus trusted Lucid knew him better than that. "I wanted to prove that the One was not just an accident or a miracle, but a sum of parts. You were an intellect, a worshiper of the body, a creator, and a believer. You were all the things in small quantities that I thought fortune-sent in your predecessors.
"Trinity called me a Creationist in my faith," he faltered as regret for her loss struck him low in the gut. He recovered, "but in you I believed there was such a thing as an evolved person, a man of many talents who had enough diversity to adapt them to a larger role. The real world was meant to be your evolutionary impetus, me the observer and assistant only."
Morpheus bent to place one hand where Lucid's immobile chest lay beneath the blanket; the other he wrapped around a pendant of Zion's stone he kept with him always. "I cannot promise you I will never kill again with these beliefs, Lucid. I can only promise to try. For every life lost, I have learned a hard lesson. It is not fair that you should have to perish so that I may be educated, but I pray you find comfort in knowing your death," he sucked in a hard breath to steel his last words against the bitter cold of the ship, "will not be the last."
There was nothing else a commander could say to his soldier. Nothing else would come to his lips, save for words like "you have not died in vain," which sounded false in his mind's ear. How could they not be false? They would have been spoken by a man duped by his belief in himself. That's what it amounted-his arrogance, his conceit had gotten good people killed. This is the price that dreamers pay? He raged against the Oracle, blamed her for setting his path among a thicket of thorns.
Enough. Precious time was wasting. He could set aside his grief for now, save it for a time of prayers. The Neb flickered back to life under his trained and experienced touch. It would take about an hour for the entire crew to filter out, those who were so inclined. Until that time, he would patrol the Matrix, take his shift at the newly revived monitors, and attempt once more to find the name that stuck in his brain but never made it to his tongue, the face that defied him to deny its divinity but never showed itself.
Forces of habit had not been lost upon promotion. He checked the last operator's logs, swallowing a threatening lump when he saw they were Trinity's. She had been on operator duty for Lucid's solo run; Morpheus smiled wistfully remembering her obstinance as she refused to give over the chair following her monitoring shift when Lucid's run began. The logs were open, ranked in order from the most recent to oldest notes recorded on her activities. All seemed routine-ghosts of ghost runs collecting information on potential recruits, possibilities for future ghost run sites, registering known Agent activity, dead hardlines in need of patching, or compromised exits.
Her routine left only one log unaccounted for, a log marked 'passover,' and nothing more. It was not locked, so he assumed it was not private. He called it up and scanned over the data. The first, oldest part of the information was a record he remembered having drawn up almost a year ago. It seemed ages ago, a time when he'd been at a loss so total it was rivaled only by his current spiritual quagmire. It was the man who might have been Lucid, but for his failure to apply his talents in any direction Morpheus could reconcile with his conception of the One.
After this initial report, which was marked 'pass,' to indicate a dead file, someone, presumably Trinity, had added enough information to dwarf their preliminaries. A graph of the subject's-Neo's-activities followed a sinusoidal curve up to the end of the original report; Neo's wavering between interest and apathy with regards to their cause had cost him a ticket out of the Matrix. Trinity's continuing notes showed a plummet in his abilities made only more remarkable for its swift, eccentric, impossibly instantaneous recovery a few months after the depression. Curiously, Neo's interaction with the truth in cyberspace plummeted after-Morpheus double-checked the date on the original file-and only after they had dropped him, resigning him to his life as a battery.
They had dropped him. Trinity did not seem to have gotten that message. The meticulous details of his activities, monitoring his behaviors, from sleeping patterns to personal interactions-of which, there were all too few-stunned him. To have this much knowledge, she would have had to have been watching Neo every shift she worked and then some. Suspicion flared in his mind. For Trinity to have learned so much, she would have watched Neo very carefully. For Neo to have risen so far, so fast, he would have to have had help-some motivation at the very least. His thoughts ran the gamut of decrying her for treason and lauding her for being able to hide this for so long.
The heaters kicked on with a hiss, and a warm stream of air blew around his feet. Yet he felt chilled. Not chilled, he blinked as the disorder and wonder in his brain clicked home, chills. He continued reading the log, a growing sense of amazement wrapping around his heart. In the time since the Neb had left him behind, Neo had advanced to a position of standing with regards to his talents at breaking, entering, and leaving data stores undetected that were enviable in any recruit. He showed a marked disregard for the laws of the society in which he currently resided.
None of that mattered, really.
In his faith, there were no coincidences. Luck, yes, lucky people, sure, but luck that ran the risk of being predictable? Hardly. Coincidence denied fate, something he knew, despite his curses at the Oracle, he still held true. Ten years of his life, spent searching, hoping, recovering, had come to this: in the hour he was prepared to admit defeat, to accept that he could do only his best, nothing more, Neo's file fell in his lap. It was as if it had waited until this very last moment, waited for the last shred of his patience and perseverance to fail him. Just at that moment-that moment that was this moment-Neo's data sought him out to tempt the disenfranchised cleric back into the fold. Brought him back from the precipice.
According to Trinity's log, Neo was frantically searching for any traces of him in the Matrix. Ten years of captaining, twice that many since having his fate declared, only to just realize what the twinkle and riddle in the Oracle's words spelt out for his future. She told me I would find the One. Those were his words, the ones that had filled him with pride, pride ripped and rendered asunder by five deaths at his hands. Her words were far less specific; they invariably were:
"Busy times ahead for you, Morpheus." She lights her cigarette.
Ma'am?
"You better be paying attention when the time comes. Don't want to miss the bridegroom and all that."
You're referring to a parable?
"Clever boy. Always ready to show it off, too, aintcha?" Her grin is too well-informed for him to argue, but he demurs.
Hardly, ma'am.
"I wish I could have told you not to let this go to your head years ago, but you weren't available then."
Let what go to my head?
"Pride. It will go before the fall and all that, but you'll recover. You always do."
Thank you. I think.
"Don't go thanking me yet. I'm promising hard times for you."
I took that chance when I took the red pill, ma'am.
"Always so polite, too." She stubs out the butt in an ashtray. "Are you sure you're up for this, Morpheus?"
I believe in fate. I can't escape whatever you tell me.
"Won't stop you from trying," she laughs, a sound of rocks on sandpaper as she coughs, barely getting out the rest. "Lord love you, but you are a stubborn thing."
I don't think so.
"See?" He has no answer and imagines that she knows this. She does, and says, "You've heard what I've told the others."
The prophecy? The One will return and his coming will...
"...hail the destruction of the Matrix, yes, yes, I know that. I don't need you to tell me what I said yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Been giving that message to Zion for nigh on eighty years now, at least. The One was barely in his grave before I promised he'd come back. If I had said word one just a day or so earlier, the One would have been mightily upset to hear it as he would have been alive at the time."
Ma'am.
"I want to know what you think about that, Morpheus."
I believe it.
"Because I said so?"
Because I believe it.
"You'd better watch out for that." He wants to ask what this means, but she is not looking, not responding to his significant yet hesitant, sharp inhalations. "Cheer up!" She stands, reaching to place a freshly-baked brownie on a napkin for him. "I've got good news for you."
I thought you said there were hard times ahead.
"And you assume the two are mutually exclusive? For masochists they're not."
I'm no masochist.
"No, you're worse," she hurumphs, "you're a martyr, Morpheus."
No.
"Stubborn, too."
He does not deny this because these is no way to speak without proving her right.
"Right, good news. The good news, the best news Zion's gotten out of me-besides all the 'One returning' stuff I trot out every year-since I first made that prophecy." A pause, another smile. She is always smiling, even when she's frowning to be sympathetic on someone's behalf. It comes from seeing the future and knowing all man's folly at once. "You will free the One, Captain."
I'm no captain.
He winces-that's all he can say? She smiles wider.
"Things change." They do because it begins to sink in, begins to register with him.
Me? I'm going to find the One?
"I told you to be careful of that. It's going to bring you no end of trouble or heartbreak."
Watch what?
"Time's up, Morpheus. Take your brownie. Share with the new girl."
New girl? Niobe?
"She's mad because I haven't asked to see her. You can tell her we'll catch up much later. You'll let her know I apologize for however disassembled I may appear at that time, won't you?" It is not really a question as she already knows the answer.
Sure.
"A pleasure, Morpheus."
Ma'am.
He makes ready to leave. "Morpheus?"
Yes, ma'am?
" 'Watch what?' " He waits. "You give a good think over some time later on, and you'll figure it out. I should see you back here about then, Captain."
He began to chuckle in the refrigerating chill of the Core. When the first of his crew to risk a run upstairs showed-it was Tank, always ready to take a shift when the pluggies were skittish-he found Morpheus smiling.
"Sir, you all right?"
Morpheus rose, patting Tank on the shoulder, nodding at the files onscreen. "Him. Full report. Concentrate on fleshing out this file. Pass it on to whoever relieves you."
"Sir." It fell somewhere between a reply and a question.
"There is no 'I' in 'The One,' Tank."
If Tank had hoped for answer, that was not it.