Title: Choices and Chances: Chapter Six

Author: Stormhawk

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer:

Meh...you know it as well as I do

Chapter Word Count: 1517

Chapter Summary: Mero spills his guts...almost literally...

Notes: I don't think there's any for this chapter

Please read and Review.

The building Le Vrai was in, was thankfully, a mainly human establishment. Stef had never wondered about that, but today she was just thankful.

Mero was perverse, predictable, and drank too much wine. So instead of wandering right into the dining room, where all of his guards were - which would end up in a fight with lots of scared civilians and no information being given, she waited down near the bathroom.

Sitting in the alcove with one of the phones, it afforded her a good vantage position and he wouldn't immediately be aware of an agent in his place of business.

It didn't take long enough, but it took long enough for him to appear. As soon as the door swung shut, she looked around to make sure no one was watching her and followed him in.

Subtlety is for the subtle.

"Where is he Mero?" Stef demanded as she none-too-gently jammed her gun against the back of his head. He turned and sneered down at her.

"And how exactly did you know how to find me?" he asked, curious, but he never let his sneering attitude drop away.

"I'm full of surprises. Now tell me where he is."

"This iz so sad, ze putain is mizzing her master."

"Tell me where he is or I'm going to splatter your brains all over the wall."

"If you pull that trigger, my guards will find you and execute you."

"I reprogrammed it with an in-built silencer." A little white lie, but one that would surely work to her advantage.

"You clever putain."

"Tell. Me. Where. He. Is."

"Why? You'll shoot me anyway."

"Tell me, or I'll make you wish you were dead."

"I'm so scared, I'm quivering in fear," he said sarcastically.

She spun him around and smashed his face into the mirror. Then she turned him around and punched him in the ribs a few times. She let him go and he slipped to the floor muttering in French.

"Are you ready to tell me now Mero?" she asked him in a deceptively sweet quite.

He went to say something but she held up her hand, "I didn't even break one rib, so if you don't cooperate, I'll start on them. And if you still insist on being non-cooperative I'll break every other bone in your body. So before you say what you were going to say, think about it."

He spat some blood onto the floor and looked up, "he's nowhere you stupid bitch," he said without his oh-so-fake accent. "Hasn't your tech told you that yet? He is nowhere, that virus wipes the program clean. Are you happy now?"

"But where did the data go?"

"It went nowhere, are you having trouble understanding me? He's dead."

"He can't be dead."

"Accept it, get over it, and either shoot me or get out of my restaurant."

"Unless it broke him down character by character, he has to be somewhere. If he's been wiped clean, where did the program go?"

"It's just gone."

"When a program is deleted, it goes exile. When you delete stuff off your computer it goes and gets recycled. Everything goes somewhere."

The Merovingian just stared at her. "Checkmate you bastard," she whispered, "you never thought of that did you?"

"Of course I did," he lied, "...but I have no idea where it went."

"No, I can see it on your face. You just thought he was deleted. You have no idea where he went. How many other people have you used this 'foolproof' virus on?"

"You don't need to be concerned with that."

"That would mean a lot, and if none of them have come back, then they must be somewhere separate to the Matrix. It must be somewhere else...somewhere that doesn't have a way for them to get back."

"A backroom?" Mero asked in spite of himself.

"No, you would have had to have shunted the code there. Backrooms are structured, and enough programs would be able to hack a way out."

"If they aren't in the Matrix itself and they aren't in a backroom, then they aren't anywhere."

"Don't be so naïve. You created this virus, you must have some idea."

"0x1x0x1."

"What the hell is that?"

"The destination code, a random nonsense number. The deleted code was shunted to zero. To nowhere."

"Shunted nowhere, somewhere, nowhere, somewhere" she whispered. Something about that made her stop and think.

Then she went very still and stared at him. He looked at her expression, "you've figured it out?" he asked in surprise.

"I think so."

"Tell me!"

"Don't think so," she said and emptied her clip into his chest, knowing that he was wearing a kevlar. Just in case she was wrong, she didn't want her source of information to be dead.

Even though he was in a lot of pain, The Merovingian smirked to himself.

She walked out of the bathroom and found a door and made her way into the backdoor corridor, she walked down the hall scanning each door as she went. She was looking for something out of place. She kept walking until she came upon a door. She opened it with her key and looked around, it was just an ordinary door, but it was also a double of an already existing door that was somewhere else in the maze of hallways. She closed it and then stared.

Pulling out her gun, she shot at it. After a moment, the damage just repaired itself. She shot at the lock a few times until it fell off, she kicked it but the door didn't budge. She knelt and looked through the hole that her bullets had made and saw blackness.

Blackness, not nothingness. Blackness was nothing, but it was something nothing, rather than nothing nothing.

She sat down against the wall. She knew that she could get to where she wanted to go, or at least open the door in the way that she wanted, but how long it would stay open and how she was going to get back were her other problems.

She needed a technical opinion on this, someone that understood coding better than her. It wasn't like she could walk up and ask Jones, for besides deleting her on the grounds that she was a traitor for associating with exiles, he was the one who was looking after Smith and she wanted to give him every chance to do something on his end, anything that would give him a better chance.

Smith was not dead. She would not accept the fact that he was dead. He was fine...he was just lost somewhere beyond the Matrix. "Times like this I wish god wasn't evil," she muttered under her breath.

She needed someone to help her.

Charlie? No, he was too paranoid to help.

Vorateu? No way of contacting him.

Mero and etc? Oh look, a snowball...In Hell!

Hummer?

"Help me, Hummer-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope," she said sarcastically to no one in particular as she walked down toward his place.

She opened the door and looked around. The place was swarming with small children. "Hum?" she called.

The hippy walked into the room with a little girl on his shoulders with her hands over his eyes and Nat was attached to his leg like a koala hitching a ride.

"Nat your dad is so cool!" one of the slightly older kids, a boy about five, yelled out.

"My brother not my dad," Nat said and detached from Hummer to run over to Stef. "Party!"

Hummer lifted the little girl's hands off his eyes, "kitty want to party with us?"

Stef shook her head, "I need help."

Hummer looked at the gaggle of kids, "I'll be back in five minutes, don't destroy the place, and if you do, just leave the TV safe."

It's amazing how evil small children can look.

Hummer walked out into the backdoor. "The childcare center has to close down for the day, and I'm the only one who doesn't work nine-to-five so I've got to look after them."

"I wish you luck."

"You don't look too well, you seen a doctor?"

"Yeah, I did...Hummer, if you were jumping into this unknown place and needed a way to anchor your code to the Matrix so that you could get back, what would you do?"

"Dude...you'll have to give me a minute to think about that one." He sighed and thought for a long minute. "You would have to physically anchor yourself to the Matrix," he said in a serious voice that didn't fit his multicolor exterior. "A string would do it."

"String?"

"A code string. Pull a surface subroutine away from yourself and it will form a string of characters, and once that one runs out, another will follow it. They pull away the useless stuff first, but just so you know, system programs aren't made of junk."

"So if I go too far I'll be pulling my guts out?"

"Yep. So be careful. Where are you going anyway?"

"I really have no clue, I'll tell you when...if...I get back."