Death and Rebirth

Chapter Seventeen

Neo

---

Again, Trinity stopped typing. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, wincing at the pain it sent through the dull soreness of her forearm. She finally gave in, deciding she needed more aspirin. Damn cops, she thought as she got up and dug a small bottle of pills from her to dresser drawer. She took one with the water sitting on her desk. Damn cops and their damn bullets.

Tossing the pulls back into the drawer, she sat back down at her computer, massaging her arm for a moment before she continued her work. When she did, she was barely able to type out three words when there was a knock at her door. It came again before she could even stand, and added with the sore arm, that made her somewhat irritated. She turned the wheel of the door, and found herself face-to-face with Morpheus - just about to knock a third time.

"Trinity," he said, a little surprised.

"What do you need?" she asked after moment of silence, wanting to finish her work soon.

"I'd like you to come up to the Core for a few minutes. There's something important I need to discuss with you." She nodded, and he turned and headed down the hall.

Trinity went back to the computer and saved her work, then pulled on two sweaters that had been thrown haphazardly on her bed.

As she climbed up to the main deck, her slight annoyance at being bothered so late at night was automatically pushed to the back of her mind by her second-in-command mindset, habit after so many years with the position. She stood behind the operator's chair, very professional in her posture, as she waited for Morpheus to finish the search on the console, watching the subject the computers locked onto in the Matrix. She couldn't discern much from the pure code, only that it was a man, dark hair, fairly tall, in a sweatshirt, carrying a grocery bag down the street.

"I found this man about a week ago. He was watching one of the chatrooms about the Matrix."

"What'd he say?"

"Nothing. But he was also working on a program at the time. Virus, very good one. I did some digging, and I found out he's a program writer, and aside from being late quite a bit, he's very good at it."

"So?" Trinity asked, waiting for him to get to his point. "Plenty of those out there. What makes him so special?"

"He works for Metacortex."

Well. Impressive. "So, what is he? Executive or something?"

"No. Just a programmer."

She folded her arms and looked down for a minute before saying, "Morpheus, forgive me, but I fail to see what makes this man so worthy of our time." She reached over and brought up the almost nonexistent file Morpheus had created. As she scanned it, her expression turned to a slight frown. "Is this age correct?"

"It is."

"Morpheus," she said, speaking more authoritatively, as she so often did without knowing it. "You can't possibly be thinking of unplugging this man."

"I know he doesn't seem like much, Trinity, but I think he could be very helpful to us. He's aware of the Matrix; I want you to watch him for me, find out what information we would be able to trade for his help."

She watched the man - Thomas Anderson, she saw from his file - as he walked into his building and down a hall to his apartment. It seemed very small and disorganized.

"You're not telling me something," she said flatly, as if she didn't expect an answer. "When do you want me to start?"

He did not respond to her accusation. "First thing tomorrow."

---

Tom stabbed the chopsticks into the half-full carton of noodles and reached behind his back to straighten out the pillows a bit. Leaning back again, he picked up the remote and changed the channel once again. It landed on the news, and he resigned himself to the fact that there was nothing good on, and left it there. Through the weather and a story about a bank robbery a few streets down, he paid little attention.

"... After several months of relative inactivity, the terrorist who calls himself Morpheus lead a group attack on Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona this afternoon...." Tom stopped eating, and paid full attention to the anchorwoman. "...with a group of two other men and two women. Swat teams were on the scene immediately after a ticket clerk recognized him." A few security tapes were shown as she continued speaking, showing them as they went about whatever they were doing there, and realized that they had been caught. "Several of the officers apprehending them were killed in a gun battle, but luckily no civilians were seriously injured." More security tape, of the fight she was talking about. "One of the women did receive a slight bullet wound to her left arm, but it was not enough to slow her down. All five of them managed to escape. Phoenix police and FBI are still on high alert..."

The segment ended, and he finished off the last half of his noodles slowly, ignoring the rest of the broadcast. He left the empty carton and chopsticks on the bedside table, and went to the tiny bathroom. As he brushed his teeth - with almost the last of the toothpaste, he noticed - it took him only a moment to decide not to go online that night. Up until a few months before, the slightest mention of anything related to Morpheus or the Matrix would have had him forsaking hours of sleep, convinced that that would be the night that he had a breakthrough. But more recently....

It had taken him a while to realize that he had come to a stall. It was as if he knew everything there was to know about the Matrix, or at least, knew everything that every other hacker online knew. He had stopped finding any new information a long time ago. Now, going online meant re-reading articles he had almost memorized by now, hearing the same theories as always in chatrooms, and, ultimately, drifting to sleep at his computer feeling nothing but disappointment. He wasn't up to that tonight. Instead, he simply turned out the light, switched off the TV, and crawled into bed.

Would he ever discover the truth?

---

In the future, the slightly corny thought would briefly cross her mind that that morning had been the beginning of the end, for her and everyone else. She would look back and think that everything had been set in motion that day. For now, though, she was only following orders, reporting to the main deck as soon as she woke up to observe Thomas.

The first day, during both the morning and evening shifts, was uneventful. He hit the snooze button twice, slept in ten minutes late. He brushed his teeth and dressed a little hastily, and put two frozen waffles in the toaster as he put seemingly random pieces of paper into a small, worn briefcase. She noticed that his apartment was even smaller than she had thought the night before, and more disorganized, too. He poured syrup over the waffles and ate them standing at the counter, even though there was a table off in the corner. He made it to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare, and sat alone in the back when it came. When he got to work, Trinity wondered again how this man could possibly be of any use to them. He spent the rest of her shift working on the coding for some program. Her evening shift was equally uneventful - he came home on the bus, ate his dinner, and didn't do much for the rest of the evening.

The next day was the same, and the next. The only thing she learned about him was that he was far from being the life of the party, and that, if asked, he would help his landlady with a chore or two. She seemed to like him much more than Trinity did. It took Thomas nearly a week to go online, and even then, all she learned was his alias - Neo.

She still could not see what Morpheus did. He did not go online as much as she had expected - certainly much less than other people she had known in a similar situation. When she watched him, she did not see a brilliant programmer and hacker, yearning for the truth and willing to go to great lengths to find it. The only thing she saw was an average man in a rut with very little excitement in his life, who just happened to work for a software company and know about the Matrix.

---

Trinity's skepticism about Morpheus' rationale for profiling Thomas only increased when the rest of the crew learned of him a few days after she began watching him. They weren't buying it much more than she was. He was only a programmer, even if he did work for Metacortx. He was a good hacker, true, but they unplugged almost nothing but hackers. His explanation simply didn't add up.

There was muffled disapproval of what Morpheus was doing, worry that he would try something they all knew he shouldn't, as he was apt to do sometimes. A few ideas and theories popped up amongst the crew, and they questioned him on them, though not in so many words. None of their efforts paid off however, being met with a simple denial of whatever particular idea they were presenting at the time, or a reiteration of his explanation. The crew quickly gave up asking Morpheus himself, and settled for trying to figure it out in their own minds. Cypher, on the other hand, did not seem content to leave it be.

"You don't honestly believe that bullshit Morpheus is feeding us about why we're watching this guy, do you?"

"I don't," Trinity said simply, hacking into Thomas' computer, to check see what he had worked on when he had stayed home 'sick' that day. "But he told me to watch him, and until I figure out what's going on, that's what I'm going to do."

"You don't think he'll just end up using whatever you find out to do something he shouldn't?"

"No. Nothing too drastic, at least."

He leaned back against the console and watched her work over her shoulder. After a moment, he stared off into the dim light at the far end of the Core. "I think he's going to try to unplug him."

Trinity stopped typing abruptly. She stared at him for several seconds, but he did not go on. "He's too old."

"Amazingly enough, Trin, I don't think that'll stop him."

"Morpheus may not be the textbook definition of sane, Cypher," she said as she turned in her chair to face him more directly, "but he wouldn't do something so stupid. At his age, he'd die in just a few days and we'd never be able to get any help from him. At least he would die in a few days, if we even managed to pull him from the sewers alive."

"C'mon, Trin -"

"Don't call me that."

"- you know as well as I do, you don't watch someone to get their help while they're inside. An Agent gets them, the Agent gets us. Whatever Morpheus does, it'll be stupid."

"He can be a little hasty sometimes, I'll admit," she said coldly, defensively, glaring at the back of his head, "but this is obviously important to him. He wouldn't jeopardize it like that."

He met her glare for a moment, then shrugged. "Whatever," he said, walking off. "You know him better than me."

---

Over the course of the next few weeks, things changed - slowly. She did not even truly realize these changes for some time, not until nearly a month had passed, when Morpheus asked for a report on what she had learned so far. When she sat down at the computer in her cabin that night, she realized just how differently she now saw him.

When she was asked for the report, she had no idea what to write. But as she sat down at the computer in her cabin that night, she realized just how much she had learned about him, and just how differently she now saw him. Her mental image of him had changed completely. Where he was once an empty man, nearly dead inside and going through the motions of a meaningless life, he was now simply a lost man, lonesome as he continued to search for his way in life. But he was as alive as anyone she had ever met, even if he did not always seem that way. He also cared about his search for the Matrix much more than she had realized at first. Thinking of his actions and habits during the past weeks, it seemed to her now that his search was what gave him the appearance of an empty man. The rift in the Matrix plagued him to the point of becoming the center of his life, consuming every free moment he had.

Trinity stopped typing then. She felt sorry for him. There was always somewhat of a craze to escape the Matrix in those who could sense it. It was stronger in him than in almost anyone else she had ever seen. She assumed it was because he had felt it longer, being older than most, and that was why she pitied him. He was much too old to be unplugged. Even if they were to free him, he wouldn't be able to handle reality. If she were to check on him a few years from now, she knew she would find him locked away in some asylum, or dead, having been driven to suicide. She pitied him because he had no way out.

She set to typing again, pushing away those thoughts and her sudden guilt, knowing that they were only going to use him.

Between watching Neo and her other duties around the ship, Trinity managed to give Morpheus the report just before she went to bed, three nights after he had asked for it. She fell asleep thinking of Thomas.

---

He was with her.

She didn't know it from his face. She had only ever watched him in code, never from within the Matrix, and she had not looked at the image of his RSI in weeks. Rather, she sensed that she was not alone, and simply knew it was him. He came into focus, standing a few feet from her. He seemed almost faceless, yet his features reflected his image, compiled from the Matrix code. He had eyes but the fact that they were not truly his - she knew this undoubtedly - sent a quiet, fleeting longing through her.

She didn't think she commanded her body to move, but she stepped closer nonetheless. He did the same, and smiled at her just a little. Her heart fluttered a little, surprising her. Her instinct to suppress the feeling, her fear of it, almost, and the confusion were all forgotten as she gave in to her sudden desire to touch him. She put one hand to his cheek, gently. He smiled more widely, and an elated grin began to tug at her lips as she stroked his cheek with her thumb.

She wasn't entirely sure of what happened next, wasn't sure if she leaned in first or if it was him. She did not even realize what was happening. But the next thing she knew, they had come together in a kiss.

The alarm she felt was almost nothing, and it quickly fell away into nothingness as she fell further and further into the kiss. Somehow, it simply felt right that she should be doing this. Regardless of her rank and duty, regardless of the emotionless mask she sometimes forced herself to wear. This was right. He pulled her closer, resting his hands on her hips and she realized that this was the most lighthearted she had felt in quite some time. The kiss deepened, and it continued for what seemed like an eternity. It finally subsided, and they slowly broke apart. Smiling at the tingling her lips still felt, she slowly opened her eyes, not to see him smiling back...

...But to the dark metal of her cabin ceiling. She blinked many times, and when her eyes adjusted to the darkness, her mind had returned to its regular state - authoritative, in complete control of herself and her surroundings, and in complete shock at the dream she had just awakened from.

She lay in bed, dumbfounded, for some time. Where had that come from? She had never thought of him as anything more than another prospect before. She had certainly never thought of him in a romantic sense. So what the hell was this?

Her alarm soon went off. She forced herself to get up, and put it out of her mind. By the time she finished dressing, she had actually convinced herself that the dream held no significance whatsoever.

---

The dream had been nothing more than strange, but not unexpected. She was the First Officer of a Resistance ship; even she got lonely every now and again. She had just been watching him too much, and had made herself feel sorry for him. It was as simple as that. She hadn't thought anything of it, and has practically forgotten about it by that afternoon.

As it turned out, though, it was not to be the last dream. She had another a few nights after the first, almost exactly the same. This one made her wonder for a while, but this one, too, quickly ceased to worry her. She didn't even have to try to stop thinking about it.

It was when she had the third dream that she started to worry. It wasn't so much the fact that she was having such an uncharacteristic dream for the third time - although that was part of it - as what actually happened in the dream. It was like the two before it, but this time, when they separated, she did not wake up. He smiled at her, the same as before, then leaned close to her again to whisper something in her ear. She never heard what he said, unfortunately, because the sentinel alarm sounded just then.

Amidst the stress the Sentinels brought with them, she did not even realize that she had had the dream until that evening, when she was working a few bugs out of some new programs for the ship. Remembering stopped her cold, and she sat there for several minutes, trying to determine if she had actually had such a dream.

What was he going to say? She wondered as soon as she began to dome out of her daze. As much as she tried, she couldn't come up with any possibilities.

The dream did not come again the next night, nor for several nights following. As she watched him during that time, she continued to search for a reasonable explanation for having the dream yet again. It took the whole time to realize that she was truly wondering was what he was going to say. She only realized this after nearly a week, when she really began driving herself crazy.

---

She wanted to pull away, to ask him what he was going to say to her, but she didn't want to risk that it would stop him from doing so. And, more than she would admit or realized, she was enjoying the kiss. They stayed this way much longer than before, but he did eventually pull away. He looked at her and smiled softly. His eyes bothered her even more now.

He leaned over to her again, just next to her ear... but he said nothing.

"What?" she finally asked.

She felt him shake his head. "I shouldn't tell you now." He kissed her neck softly, just below her ear. "Another time."

For the fourth time, Trinity woke to the darkness of her cabin.

---

The dreams did not stop after that. Rather, they became more frequent... and more intense. She soon stopped realizing that they were dreams until she woke. The light, euphoric feeling they brought her always faded soon after she awakened, however.

How long had she kissed him this time? She rolled over to face the wall. The sheets rolled with her, and her back was left exposed to the Neb's persistently cold air, but she didn't pay attention. Why, for God's sake, why wouldn't these dreams go away? Why the hell did they even begin, in the first place?

A thought had been floating around in her head for days. She had tried to suppress it, but had only partially succeeded, and now was failing completely. It was completely unlike her, unlike the kind of independent, self-sufficient person she had always been. But hate it as she might, she could not deny to herself the possibility that she had actually developed an attraction to a man she had never met. The very prospect made her picture herself as some gushing twelve-year-old with a crush on the "cute" member of some boy band. It was absurd, by why else would the dreams persist as they had? Why not do what dreams were supposed to, move past the kiss, and help her to realize and overcome some problem she had been faced with of late? An instant later, she shut her eyes tightly against the thought that that might be exactly what the dreams were doing.

She loathed Cypher for this. He was the one who made her think of it in the first place.

"Do you ever sleep?" Cypher asked as he leaned around her. He opened a drawer at the bottom of the console, and put away a disk he had been working on.

"My shift isn't finished yet."

He loomed behind her shoulder. She could feel him watching her.

"Are you going to say something or just stand there and stare at me?"

"Awfully long shift." He paused, and Trinity tensed slightly, wondering was he would say next. "Why do you watch him so much?"

"Morpheus asked me to."

"He never asked you to do it alone. Have someone else take a shift or two."

Trinity barely had time to ask herself why she hadn't done exactly that when Cypher answered the question for her.

"If I didn't know you any better I'd say you had a thing for him."

He said this as he left, so he never knew that she didn't answer because she sat in shock, knowing that he may very well have been right. For days after, she could not force herself to stop asking why she had not split some of the duty of watching him among the other crewmembers. Morpheus wouldn't have minded, nor would the rest of the crew. They would have been more than willing to help.

She was the one who would have minded.

---

"Trinity," Switch called for the third time. "Wrench?"

Trinity came out of her daze, and handed it to her. She wasn't really working on the repairs; she just came down without saying anything. But Switch would not have her down there and doing nothing.

"Should I be worried about you?" she asked.

Trinity didn't register the question at first, and when she did, she wasn't sure what to say. She tried to speak several times, but couldn't force herself. "I'm just starting to wonder what Morpheus is going to do with Neo," she finally admitted.

"'Starting' to wonder?" she laughed. "Newsflash, Trinity, he's been lying to us about him the whole time."

"I just thought I'd have figured out what was really going on by now," she said quickly. "It's not like him to keep secrets from me."

Switch smirked. "He probably wants to do something really stupid with the Coppertop and doesn't want you talking him out of it."

Fear suddenly flared in Trinity's mind at the idea.

"You'll find out soon enough, though. Morpheus can't drag this out forever."

After severally minutes, she finally made up her mind. "I have work to do," she said quietly, standing up to leave.

"When did you start calling him Neo?" Switch called after her.

"What?"

"You called him Neo," she explained. "You always called him Thomas before."

Again, Trinity said nothing. There was nothing she could say. She never called prospects by their hacker names. She hated to think why she might have started now.

"Not starting to worry about the Coppertop, are we?"

She became defensive. She didn't want anyone to know about her situation - not even her best friend. "Just a slip of the tongue."

She must not have been very convincing, though, because there was a sudden tension between them, and Switch looked at her with worry for a long time. "You plan on telling me what's wrong?"

"This was the last thing she wanted. Even though the details were still a secret, the fact that another person knew about this somehow made it real, and it took away the possibility that it might go away on its own. "Nothing's wrong," she muttered. She opened the door, but only managed to walk halfway through it.

"Why are you lying to me, Trinity?"

She gave no reply and left.

---

Feeling anger toward him was ridiculous, especially as he was now. He sat alone at a table in the park a block away from his office building, reading a paper someone had left there earlier. He was slowly consuming a sandwich from a little deli down the street. He was perfectly serene this way, harming no one, causing no trouble, and yet Trinity sat on her motorcycle across the street, mulling over her anger.

She was in this whole ugly situation because of him. Sleep, concentration, self-control, her ability to function, fight and lead, all had suffered because of this man. He was playing games with her mind, tormenting her, and leaving her with so many unanswered questions. He left her feeling a million disconcerting new things that had no right to pass through her mind.

Part of her wanted to go over there now and beat it out of him, as though that would somehow make him stop, force him to leave her in peace. She very well may have, if he hadn't looked as he did just then. Even as far away as he was, she could see his face, and she could not remember seeing anyone that lonely in many, many years.

You only have yourself to blame, she thought, feeling a horrible pang of guilt. He didn't do a damn thing. You spent too much thinking about him, you got attached, you brought him into your dreams. She could barely stand to look at him anymore, and her eyes found themselves looking at the pavement beneath her boots. He didn't do anything. He doesn't even know you exist.

She forced herself to look up again, and watched him for a long time.

There was no point in denying it anymore. She couldn't, at any rate. Cypher had given her the idea in the first place, but she knew it would have occurred to her sooner or later. She honestly didn't believe it was true, at first. She didn't even remember half of the explanations she had come up with, but none of them convinced her. The longer she denied it, the more she ultimately knew it was true, and the more terrifying it became. That she could remember, she had not had even one tiny childhood crush in her life - little else could be more out of character for her than this. Nothing was more out of character than for her to allow this to happen.

And for that, she hated herself more than she ever had in her entire life.

---

She didn't turn the light on. There was no point. On or off, it didn't change the dream.

It had started off the same as each and every other, but when they broke the kiss, he didn't say anything, not even to tell her she wouldn't want to hear. She wanted him to say something, anything, but after what seemed like forever, he still remained quiet. So, finally, Trinity decided that she would say something.

"I love you."

It had felt right in the dream, like she'd wanted to say it for her entire life. But now, as she sat awake in the dark, it was that feeling that terrified her. Dreams revealed the deepest, most closely guarded emotions a person held. What other explanation could there be now? What was to be gained in denying it any further? Why say the words, even in a dream, if she didn't mean them?

It made perfect sense. It explained her every unexplainable action and emotion since Morpheus had first told her about him. Still, she hoped, prayed, desperately, that there was some other reason. But that hope was shattered when, the next night, Neo whispered the same words back to her.

She could do nothing but obsess over it for days. She wasn't able to finish a single task on the Neb on time, and she was sure none of the crew believed the excuse that she was becoming sick, least of all Morpheus. Even so, he didn't press her on the issue, and assigned her less important tasks, the ones that did not need to be completed so quickly. Trinity hated the attention, hated seeming so obviously weak and pathetic and helpless in front of everyone, but at the same time, she was grateful. The rest of the crew, however, was not so content to let her slide. There were plenty of questions, which soon became rhetorical because she would either lie or say nothing. Cypher badgered her several times, but finally gave up. She caught Switch giving her worried, sometimes suspicious looks. Dozer, though, did just what she would have guessed he would do. Only blood stopped him from being her protective big brother, and he always acted like it. Both of them came in late to dinner that night, and they stayed later than the others did. "Are you all right?"

Silence as she half-heartedly stirred the goop in her bowl.

"You've been acting really strange lately. And don't tell me that you're sick," he said quickly, seeing that she was about to say something in her defense. "You're as healthy as you've ever been."

She shook her head, telling him it was nothing, but didn't say anything.

"And it's not just the last few days -"

"Dozer, it's nothing."

"- you haven't been yourself for weeks -"

"Dozer -"

"We're all really starting to worry about -"

"It's personal," she nearly yelled. Her eyes were closed, and she kept them that way. "I can figure it out for myself," she said in a much softer voice.

"Trinity, you know if you need anything..."

"I know," she whispered, trying to rub away the sudden pain in her neck.

He stood from his seat across from her, still looking concerned. "I'm really worried about you," he said as he opened the door. "I haven't seen you act this way since you came back from the Oracle."

Those words struck a chord as he left as he left.

For a short time - a very short time - she thought she was saved. For a short time, she thought she had found the one thing that saved her from Neo. And, ironically, that thing was supposed to also save the entire human race. How could she have forgotten? It was on her mind constantly after she had seen the Oracle, how could it have escaped her completely in the last few weeks?

She would fall in love with the One. She couldn't be in love with Neo.

---

This revelation didn't sustain her for very long. Trinity knew from the start that it wouldn't. As when the Oracle first spoke the words, it brought more questions than answers.

She had gone through hell for weeks because of him. It had made complete chaos of her life. If she wasn't truly in love with Neo, she was sure she would do nothing short of break down completely when she met the One.

She told him she loved him in the dream. When she did, no human on or beneath the face of the earth could have spoken truer words. Why would she have said them if they were a lie? What was it that she felt for Neo, if not love?

It didn't matter, though. The words she spoke in the dream were not a lie. It was a lie to tell herself that they were anything but the unquestionable truth. And it was not one she was able to maintain. The dreams continued. They weren't all the same, and she couldn't always remember them. Even so, she had them almost every night, and when she woke, the same words were always ringing in her ears.

Finally, it just became too much. She spent the entire night tossing and turning, occasionally drifting in and out of half-sleep. Some time around three she resigned herself to the fact that the Oracle's prophecy made no difference. She did love Neo. She had known it all along, it was just a matter of when she was willing to admit it.

She went into the early hours of the morning wondering how the Oracle could have been wrong this time when she had been correct in every other word she had ever spoken to Trinity.

The truth hit her then. It was so plainly obvious that anyone could have figured it out in an instant. She hadn't. The simple truth only occurred to her then, as she lay in her bed, and when it did, it came crashing down like the blue sky so far above.

---

Sleepless again, Trinity went to watch him again. She would see him do nothing but sleep, but she was slowly beginning to stop denying these little urges she got, even though she didn't like them.

When she reached the Core, however, she found Morpheus, already doing just that. She walked up behind him quietly. He acknowledged her only with a glance. She watched him carefully for several slow minutes. He wouldn't look at her, he was tense.... He would tell her now, if she asked. She leaned back against one side of the console, arms folded, eyes downcast, and waited. After many more minutes, even longer than the first, he started speaking.

"Trinity... I haven't been completely honest with you about Neo."

"No shit," she muttered. He hesitated, like he wasn't sure of himself, or didn't really want her to know just yet. The suspense was killing her. She was sure she knew already.

"You think he's the One."

When she was met with silence, she knew she was right.

---

---

Okay. So. Here's the deal. This is the end of this fic, but it's not the end of the story. I am going to go on, it'll just be a sequel. However, because I feel so guilty whenever I go too long without updating, I won't post the sequel until I have a few chapters under my belt, so I can keep posting at more regular intervals. But I PROMISE you, I WILL continue the story.

(By the by, weren't there supposed to be deleted scenes in the Matrix boxed set? I specifically remember reliable sources mentioning them, but I can't find them. Are they even there?)