DISCLAIMER: Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking legal action.
Whoa...sorry this update took so long...too many ideas, so little time. Still, enough delay with apologies, here's the next chapter - Morithil.
FIVE
"Wind blows by...low light...sidetracked...low light...can't see my tracks...your scent-way back...can I be here alone?"
Pearl Jam - Low Light.
At that moment, the blue-eyed agent was roaming the wasteland with something approaching calm. The purging winds had lessened in their frequency. Perhaps something other than garbage was preoccupying the Machine World, he mused idly. Smith walked slowly, only one button on his jacket holding the garment closed. There was no need for formality here, so he had left the remainders untouched.
The light that permeated what could have been sky was drained of all colour, as dry and sandy as the earth under his feet. The ghosts, the vacant shells of long-expired programs were silent and few these days. He could no longer determine between each day and the next in the Graveyard, hours merged with their stagnant monotony. It was a pattern of roam, scan the horizon, and retreat to wait out another night of destructive winds.
And still he would not give up.
The shine on his black shoes had long since lost its mirror-clean surface. Even the precision-crisp edges of his shirt collar and cuffs were beginning to wilt, and for the second time that morning, day, week, Smith remembered that he no longer cared. After the many steps he had taken from his shelter in the hillside, the seemingly endless flat plain of dust was interrupted. Out from the loose ground a long arc of some hard substance, neither bone nor metal, or a mixture of both, protruded, a jutting claw from the giant paw of a carnivore.
Smith watched tiny grains of sand travel along the smooth, neglected surface, his head tilting to one side as he attempted to identify the strange object. A stronger breeze swept more dirt away from it. Smith looked up, trying to pinpoint if and when the winds were coming to carry him into oblivion. The horizon was oddly still. He turned back to the object and crouched down before it, blue eyes narrowing into slits, hooded by sandblasted eyelashes.
The once-agent reached down and brushed away more dirt with the flat palm of his hand, finding that the arc continued before concluding in what could only be described as a joint, and then another curve began into the ground.
Smith sighed to no one, least of all himself. He was precious short of any time-consuming activities other than waiting for the winds and sitting out every howling night in his metal cocoon, and at present the winds seemed intent on staying elsewhere. He knelt on the ground, disregarding the pale whiteness that dusted his trouser knees, and with an uncharacteristic gentleness, began to dig the artefact out of the desert plain.
Smith worked tirelessly, with a methodical single-mindedness that only his kind possessed. He rolled his shirtsleeves up his arms, baring strong wrists to the still, heavy air. With every careful sweep of his palms more was revealed, more arcs of that strange bone-metal hybrid material, more that ended like long, almost straight claws that fanned out like pins in a bird's wing.
Smith sat back on the desert floor at that.
Lying before him, almost completely freed from its earthy prison, were a pair of extensive, long-pinned wings. The skeletal outline of a bird's method of flight. Smith estimated that each wing was almost his full height. The strong joints had suffered minor abrasions as a result of their abandonment, but otherwise the structure of the bones, as they now apparently were, regardless of their actual material base, was solid. Smith traced the curve of a pin slowly, considering. Powerful means to travel, and they would have been the ideal method of escaping his current predicament, only-
They were not meant for him. From the almost-gone remnant of a serial number underneath a curve of one joint, the former agent concluded that these, if they were meant for anything at all, came from a significant period of time before he had emerged into the Matrix. An older program had used these. But why? And having excavated the wings and found nothing else, where was the program they had been assigned to?
Smith wiped a dusty brow, suddenly having more questions than answers. And then he heard it.
Still some way across the Graveyard, but approaching faster than the last time; the winds.
Sparing no economical movement, Smith sprang into action. Rising swiftly, he lifted the skeletal wings into his arms. Burdened by their considerable weight, he nevertheless hoisted them as best as he could over one shoulder, and ran.
Smith ran faster than he had on his best days in the Matrix, the days when sprinting across rooftops and jumping from one skyscraper to the next had been a near-joy, not a chore. Dust began to swirl past his ankles, and he realised that the winds were catching up, snapping invisible jaws at his heels and howling behind him.
Faster. Faster. Smith urged himself on, the winds screaming now, whistling in his ears as they closed in on him. In the dust-carrying winds sweeping around him he made out the shape of his shelter, his only sanctuary in the Graveyard. Spurred on by this fresh hope, Smith ran even faster, feeling the shrill wind begin to loom over him, hungry to sweep him away into nothingness, and there would be no purpose, no purpose to his finding the wings and bringing them with him, no purpose to the empty pattern of his days in the Machine Graveyard, no purpose to there still being a Smith existing in some part of the Machine World-
The door was before him, and Smith leapt to it, swinging it open and bolting it shut defiantly behind him, clutching the wings uselessly, punishing fingers curling around the outstretched arms yearning for flight, and held on.
There was a time.
There was a time when he was the most feared thing in the Real World, when rebels spoke of agents in hushed voices, mouths dry with fear. A time when his name carried more weight behind it than a thousand such Morpheuses and Zions. When the Matrix bowed to him, and obeyed his rules, prisoner to him, under his personal control.
There was a time when the Matrix was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he had wandered through it, in silent awe. A stranger in paradise.
Smith, he murmured to himself. I have a name, and I have a purpose. To get out of here, and back into the Matrix. This time he would recreate the first memory he had of it. There would be no storms or blackened skies. There would be light, clarity.
There would be a tomorrow.
Smith folded the wings across his lap and waited for the night to scream itself raw.