Part 1
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Matrix stuff yadda yadda yadda.
Timeframe: Over ten years before the Matrix.
Psycho D-Girl is mine and whoever else you don't recognise.
My father stared off into space, that was the first sign I got. The second was the fact that he stood up and just walked out, without telling anyone where he was going. I remember not so long ago both my parents had gone to great lengths to hide what they were from us; my twin sister Jennifer and me. Then I had seen what my father could do. I was twelve at the time and I remember it like it was yesterday, I was roller blading down a small, pretty much deserted street and it wasn't all that bright down there when I saw them fighting. My father and a dark man dressed in a suit. I suppose it wasn't that weird when I look back on it, but the fact that the dark man was wearing sunglasses in a dark alley all but screamed the fact that this wasn't right. I came to a stop not far from them.
"What are you doing?" I had asked. At my voice my father had turned from his opponent, he seemed shocked that I was there. The man took advantage of my fathers momentary distraction and leaped for the nearest fire escape, climbing upwards and out of sight.
"Where did you come…never mind. I can explain everything as soon as we get home." For the first time in my life my father was flustered, he didn't know how to react to the situation. In my naiveté I thought that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation as to just what he had been doing.
When we returned home my mother was already there, she was a lot calmer than my father was. Jennifer was there to and my parents sat us both down.
"We are programs for the system." My mother said. I looked at Jennifer, eyebrows raised, but she looked as confused as I was.
"What are you talking about?" She asked.
"We have permission to tell you that this place is all a program. None of it's real." My father said.
"Like something on TV?" I asked. My mother shook her head.
"In a way I suppose it is, but not quite. Like I told you already your father and I are both programs of that system. I'm a systems analyst and programmer, your father is an agent. This place you are in is like a computer program, millions of human minds are plugged into it by machines. It was the only way we could survive, we need their energy. This was the perfect solution, humans get to live out their own dreams, their own lives, and in return we get to use their energy." She said. I looked at Jennifer again and it was obvious we both came to the same conclusion, both our parents had lost their marbles. Falling back on the sofa I laughed out loud.
"I thought you didn't like fantasy stories, mom. If you're programs then what are me and Jen? Are we programs to?" I asked.
"No you are both human." She replied.
"Now that doesn't make sense. If you're programs or machines or whatever you can't have human children, can you? You really have to study up on this stuff if you're going to try and convince us that's true." I said turning to Jennifer.
"You ready to learn how to roller blade now?" I had been trying to convince her for ages to try roller blading. This conversation seemed to have made her lose all inhibitions about breaking her neck though, because she nodded and stood up and we were going out the door when my father spoke.
"She isn't lying. We can prove that it is the truth." He said. I turned back to face him and waited.
"Well? Show us." I said. Mo mother closed her eyes and for a brief moment I saw the house myself and everyone else disappear, to be replaced my lines of some kind of code. Then everything returned to normal.
"How did you…what did you just do?" I asked in surprise.
"I told you, this is a program." My mother said.
From that day on I knew that this wasn't real, none of it. What my parents had said was true, and I hated them for it. I couldn't believe that the whole human race could be enslaved without knowing it. That's how it started; I wanted to find out who that man was my father had been fighting in that alley that day, because I knew that he had the rest of the answers that no one could give me. I did things to get myself noticed by him, racing cars and bikes that I learned to improve myself. Then I met Steve, he was two years older than me and he knew his way around a computer like no one I had ever seen before. He thought me a few things and I started my search for the 'dark man', as I now referred to him as, I had no name to go on and I found a lot more stuff than I bargained for. The 'dark man' had been labelled a terrorist, he wasn't referred to by name on the internet either, but he wasn't the only one. There were so many others, the most prominent of which was Morpheus. Steve and I tried to contact someone out there. Then Steve told me that he was being watched and I knew who was doing the watching. I told him to stay away from the agents, if they came in his direction run the other way. Then one day Steve didn't show up, he disappeared. I continued doing what I was doing by myself. I wasn't sure if Steve had been killed or taken by the agents or if he had found the truth.
In the meantime I had been told numerous times by my parents to stop what I was doing, but like I said earlier I now hated them because they were a part of the conspiracy to control humans. Naturally I completely ignored what they said, if anything I worked even harder on it.
One night after a particularly hard underground race I was returning home when I saw an agent car chasing another one and I knew that these were some of the people who could help me. Even as I speeded to catch up I saw the agent car slam into the side of the one they were chasing, both cars came to a halt. I crashed into the side of the agents car, forcing it to move away from the other one. The car I was driving was well built, so there wasn't much damage, I waited a moment to see if they were going to get out. When they didn't I climbed out of mine and walked towards the one the agents had crashed into. The man who had been driving was unconscious and the man riding shotgun was not much better off. I struggled to open the door of the car, but in the crash is had been badly damaged. I opened the back door and got in, reaching forward I hauled the man behind the wheel into the back and I climbed into the front. I picked up the mobile that was on the dashboard; obviously one of them had been using it before the crash. I put it to my ear.
"Tell me where you want these guys to go and I'll get them there." I said into it. There was silence for a moment.
"Who is this?" A female voice asked.
"Who I am isn't as important as the agents who are going to show up any minute." I said.
"Which way do I go?"
"Do you know the old warehouse on Marehan road?" She asked.
"Yeah." I replied.
"There will be someone waiting there to get them out." She said. I tossed the phone back on the dashboard and took off. I glanced over at the guys in the passenger seat and got a shock.
"Steve? What the hell…you got out." And that was all I had time to say, in the rear-view mirror I had spotted an agent car. I watched the speedometer rising slowly as I went faster and faster I ripped around the corner on two wheels and down a side alley. This was the same track that the race had taken earlier and I had driven that three times. I knew it by heart. There was hardly any traffic on the road tonight. I closed my eyes, not really sure if it was the right thing to do or not, but knowing that the agents could track me somehow. I counted down the seconds in my head. After almost three minutes I screeched to a stop and opened my eyes, we were right out side the warehouse. I pushed out the remaining glass in the door and climbed out that way, grabbed the phone as I opened the back door.
"I'm here. Where to now?" I asked as I pulled the man out of the back seat.
"Second floor of the warehouse. There's a man coming down to help get them out." She said. Even as she said it I saw the man in question and nearly dropped the guy I was dragging.
"You're him." I said in surprise. He gave me a suspicious look.
"I'm who?" He asked. I shook my head.
"We don't have time; there were agents right behind me. I think I lost them, but I can't be sure." I said. He opened the passenger door and pulled Steve out.
"You need help walking, Malachi?" He asked. That must be his name now, I thought. Malachi mumbled something I couldn't hear, the dark man helped him up the stairs and I followed, dragging the other man with me. I'm not that strong and he was heavy so it took a few moments for us to reach the top. I wasn't sure why the dark man trusted me, if I was in his shoes I would have been a little more suspicious. We went into a room where a phone was ringing, the dark man put it to Malachi's ear and I stared in shock as he disappeared in silver threadlike things.
"What was that?" I asked. Ballard put the phone back in the cradle and then came over and took the other man from me.
"How we get in and out." He said. In and out of what? I wondered, but I didn't say anything out loud. The phone rang again and once more the dark man pressed it to the other mans ear and he to disappeared. He turned to me once more.
"Thank you for your help." He said. The phone started ringing again.
"There's something I want in return." I said.
"What's that?" He asked.
"I want out as well. I know this isn't real and I don't want to live this lie anymore. I want to see what's real." I replied.
"I thought you might." He said.
"But not yet, there's something I need to do first." I said.
"We can do it tomorrow night."
"How do I contact you…what's your name?"
"I'm Ballard. You won't have to. You still have the phone that Malachi was using. We'll contact you." He reached for the phone.
"Until then." I said. I turned and walked out of the room before he had a chance to say anything else.
"We need to talk." I said as soon as I came into the house. Jennifer looked up from where she was reading some kind of schematics.
"What about?" She asked.
"Not here. Let's go for a walk." I pulled the door open again and followed her back out of the house. We walked in silence for a long time.
"Well? What is it?" She asked. Now that the moment was here I couldn't seem to find the courage to tell her, but I had to.
"I'm getting out and I want you to come with me." I said in a rush.
"Get out of where?" She asked.
"You know where. They're going to get me out tomorrow. Please, Jen, you've got to come with me." I said. She stopped walking, but remained silent for a moment.
"I need time to think about it." She said. She turned back in the direction of the house.
"Don't take to long, it happens tomorrow." I called after her.
I worked on my bike that night. I knew that it wasn't real, but working on the bike or my car had always helped when I was feeling nervous or excited. Besides I'd probably be using it tomorrow and I wanted to make sure it was up to the job of getting me where I needed to go. I was fairly sure that they wouldn't let me leave if they could stop it. I stayed in the garage all night and most of the next day. Late in the afternoon the door to the garage opened and Jennifer stood there.
"You made your mind up?" I asked her.
"Yes." She said, and then shut up. I stood up from my crouch over the bike and watched her as she moved around the garage picking things up and putting them down again.
"And…" I prodded her.
"And I'm not going. Father has offered me the chance to work for them and it seems like a good idea." She said.
"What exactly do you mean 'work for them'?" I asked suspiciously.
"It means that I'm going to work for the agents, do the same kind of thing that father does." She replied.
"So you're saying to hell with it? You'd rather live in this…this make believe world than see what's real? Be a pawn in their chess game, because that's all you'll really be, they don't care about us, Jen. You know they don't. Given half the chance they'd turn us in." I snapped.
"Yes, I would. Which brings us to another point, they're tired of having to clean up your little messes, and they want you taken care of. You stay here or you die, it's that simple. The choice is yours." She smiled sweetly at me. Like looking into a demented mirror, where the person staring back at me looks exactly the same but they don't act the same.
"What do you mean 'taken care of'?" My blood ran cold, I already knew the answer to that one, I just didn't want to believe it. In my pocket I could feel the phone vibrate as Ballard tried to contact me. Our eyes met, and I knew that it would never be the same again. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, answered it and pressed it to my ear.
"Five thirty, Union Square bridge. Ask the man sitting on the bench for a light." Ballard said.
"I'll be there." I said and hung up. It was already five fifteen; I grabbed the keys for the bike as I moved towards it. Something hit me hard in the shoulder.
"What the hell are you doing?" I snapped at Jennifer.
"You can't leave. You see I told them that you'd join them. If you don't then you must die." She said it as calmly as if she was discussing the weather. I moved my hand to my shoulder and only then realising that my hand wouldn't move the way I wanted it to, she had thrown a spanner at me and it hurt like hell.
"And you're going to do it?" I asked incredulously.
"I don't like it, but if I have to yes I will." She replied. I faked moving left then sprang past her on the right, she kicked me as I did and I lurched forward, almost falling flat on my face, but I managed to regain my balance. I turned back to her and tried to move my hands into a defensive position, but my injured arm still refused to respond. Her fist hit me on my unprotected side, she followed this up with a quick roundhouse kick and I flew back into the trashcans. I quickly got back to my feet.
"Had a change of heart?" She asked. My head rose and I glared at her.
"No. I am going and you won't stop me." I said. The laugh she gave at that sent shivers down my spine.
"Are you so sure of that?" She smirked at me.
"You're my sister, my twin. You can't do this." Call me naïve but I actually believed that.
"Wrong, I've been told to stop you that means I can do whatever I want." She moved towards me. I turned and I ran, with my injured shoulder I was in no condition to fight her anyway and I had a sneaking suspicion that she could use any kind of fighting technique she wanted to.
I arrived at Union Square five minutes late, it couldn't be helped, I had been sidetracked by an agent and had to go the long way. I didn't recognise the man on the bench as either Malachi or the driver of the car from the night before and I wasn't sure if he was with Ballard. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette, but I must have dropped them somewhere along the way. What the hell? I figured. The worst he could say was no. I walked up behind him.
"Can I bum a cigarette off you?" I asked. He turned to face me; I couldn't see his eyes as he wore sunglasses. He pulled a packet of John Player from a jacket pocket and offered it to me silently. I stuck one between my lips.
"You got a light?" I mumbled around the butt of the cigarette. His other hand came up and a silver lighter flashed to life. I inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out through my nose. He made no move to get up off the bench, but he continued to stare at me. Now I was starting to get a little nervous. I was ready to bolt at a moments notice.
"Aren't you a little young to be smoking?" He asked.
"I'm sixteen. Besides they're not real anyway, or didn't you know that?" I said. He stood up, putting one hand inside his jacket.
"Good answer. I'm Bane, come with me." He led me to a motorbike parked nearby.
"Nice bike." I commented. He gestured for me to climb on behind him. I did and put one arm around his waist to hold on, my other arm still wouldn't work right, my shoulder was probably dislocated, and the pain was getting worse, but I didn't say anything about it.
He brought the bike to a stop outside an abandoned hotel and we got off. He brought me inside the darkened building and up the stairs into a room that was probably the only one that hadn't been looted. Ballard waited inside and he turned to me as we entered.
"You're late." He said.
"I had some family business that needed to be taken care of." I said. He held out both his hands, in one was a red pill, the other a blue pill.
"You take the blue pill and you go back home, forget everything that happened here. Take the red and I will show you the truth. The choice is yours." He said.
"Let me guess, if I pick the wrong one then you kill me, right?" I asked, just a trace of sarcasm in my voice.
"What are you talking about?" He asked a confused look on his face. I smiled with little humour.
"Family joke, you'd have to have been there to understand." I reached for the red pill.
"Follow me." He brought me into another room. Malachi sat in front of a computer, he smiled when he saw me.
"You decided to come out." He said.
"Says the one who needed convincing that something wasn't right." I said.
"You didn't bring Jen with you." He said.
"No, she had other 'career' opportunities." I muttered under my breath. Ballard stood behind Malachi, as Bane directed me to a chair in the middle of the room.
"Can I ask a question?" I asked.
"Of course." Ballard said.
"The guy who was driving the car yesterday, is he alright?" I asked. Ballard looked surprised by the question.
"He'll be fine." He answered.
"Good." I said. Bane joined Ballard and Malachi after he had finished sticking those heart monitor thingies to me. Ballard took out a phone.
"Have you got her yet, Cyl?" He asked.
"Good, we'll be coming out as soon as she's gone." He had obviously received the answer he was looking for.
"I'm just locking onto her now." Malachi said. Why did I suddenly feel like the proverbial guinea pig?
"Got her." All of a sudden I felt like someone had dumped a bucket of warm water over me. I don't remember waking up, just landing in ice cold water and trying to stay afloat, but my shoulder and arm now felt like someone had whacked me with a hammer a few times and I curled around the pain. I vaguely remember voices speaking words that I didn't understand. Waking occasionally in a brightly lit room, needles stuck in all over my body. Each time there was a different person there.
"You didn't tell me about your broken collarbone." Ballard said one time I woke up.
"Hmm…thought it was a dislocated shoulder." I mumbled and went back to sleep.
The next time I woke up I was in a room that looked about as barren as a prison cell. My arm was strapped to the opposite shoulder and across my chest. A woman slept in the bed on the other side of the room. She woke even as I looked over at her
She sat up on the bed and walked out of the room a word. I followed her but stopped not far from the room, my hand slowly reaching for the back of my head. My fingers found a piece of metal there and I froze.
"What are you doing alone?" Someone asked.
"Bane?" I asked. He looked a lot different than he had the last time I'd seen him.
"Yeah. Did Cyl leave you one your own?" He asked. At my answering nod he frowned.
"Ballard is going to be pissed." He said.
"Why?"
"Because you shouldn't be left on your own until you know your way around," then in an obvious attempt to change the subject,
"Are you hungry?" I nodded eagerly.
"Then come with me." When we got to the mess hall he introduced me to everyone already in there.
"Zan, the driver of the car. And I believe you've already met our operator, the chirpy and always happy Cyladriel."
"Shut up, Bane." She grumbled as she sat down at the long table.
"She a really nice person once you get to know her. It's just that her and morning don't get along very well with each other." Bane said. He put a bowl of something in front of me.
"Is this some kind of glue or something?" I asked.
"It's food." Bane said. I poked at it with a spoon as if it were nuclear waste.
"It looks…delicious." I said.
"Looks like glue, tastes like glue and yet it isn't." Everyone laughed, except Cyladriel; she just glowered around at everyone. Ballard came in and when he saw me sitting there he nodded in greeting.
"Good, you're awake. Cyl, I'll be taking her into the construct once you're finished here." He said. She just grunted in response, Ballard didn't take offence to it, he was obviously used to her. I wasn't so lucky, I was apparently going to be sharing a room with her while I was here, which reminded me of something.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"The Caducus, it's my hovercraft." He joined us at the table after he had gotten himself some glue.
"And it's about 2200 or thereabouts." He finished his food in record time and stood up again.
"Come on. You to, Cyl." He said the last part almost tentatively, as if afraid that the operator would kill him for disturbing her. Sure enough she glared back at him, but stood up anyway and helped herself to another cup of what smelled like coffee and followed us out of the mess hall.
"You're arm will be able to come out of that sling in a few days. I want to be sure it's healed properly. I still think that you should have told me you were injured."
"I don't know why that matters so much. I mean it's going to heal, it doesn't even hurt that much anymore." I said.
"It's not that. When we pulled you out of the water you were going into shock. When we free someone they're already weak enough. You're heart stopped twice, you could have died." He said. That shut me right up, imagining ones own death has probably been done by everyone at least once, but to have to almost happen twice is enough to make anyone a little quieter.
"Take a seat." He pointed at a chair that looked more like it belonged in a dentist's office than here. I did what he asked anyway, half expecting him to pull out a tooth drill and start complaining about the terrible state my teeth were in. Instead he came over and pushed my head back into the weird cushion on the top of the chair.
"This is probably going to feel a little strange." He said. Cyladriel pushed at the back of my head and I felt something click into place. I tried to move my head out of the way, but Ballard held me firmly in place. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell he was doing but suddenly I found myself in a blindingly white place. A moment later Ballard was there as well.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Cyl, load the real world." He said. The environment changed to a barren looking rocky waste. In the distance I could the ruins of what looked like it had once been the Statue of Liberty.
"Over a hundred years ago we created AI. They did all the menial jobs that we didn't want to do ourselves. They had no respect. Then B-166ER killed his owner, he was put on trial. Some argued that he should receive a fair trail as he was after all the same as man. The leaders of the world disagreed and they ordered the destruction of all AI. Some of them survived and the built a city near Africa, they called it 01. They monopolised most of the worlds markets, creating everything from computer parts to hovercars. A sanction was put on 01 to stop them. 01 sent ambassadors to the UN headquarters in New York; they wanted to have a stable relationship with men. Their pleas to work together to make a better world was refused. A war started where men dropped nuclear bombs on 01, but machines do not have the same weakness to radiation that we do. 01's troops took over many countries. Our leaders came up with a final solution, the blackening of the sky. A terrible war started and millions were killed. The machines moved on, they had studied humans had found a way to use the bioelectric, thermal and kinetic energies that our bodies produced. Over time they found a way to place humans in a sort of coma like state where their minds were plugged into the Matrix. That's where you were until a few days ago. The Matrix is a computer program, none of it is real." Ballard finally finished speaking.
"Wait...you said it wasn't real, I broke my collarbone in the Matrix, how can it still be broken here if this is real?" I asked.
"Your mind makes it real." He replied.
"So if I had died in the Matrix I'd be dead here as well?" I asked.
"Yes. We'll unplug now and Cyl is going to run through the operation, combat and whatever other programs you want to learn. Cyl, get us out of here." He spoke up at the black sky. Then I was back on the ship, I suppose I'd never really left it.
"Alright, first things first, operating programs, boring but unfortunately they're necessary." Cyladriel said. She seemed to have gotten over her bitchiness. She was right though the operating programs were boring, explaining what a hardline was and how to use the exit, that sort of stuff.
"And now for the more interesting stuff. Pick a disc, any disc." Cyl held out a bunch of discs in a fan shape in one hand. I picked one and gave it to her, she looked at it briefly as she sat down behind her monitors again.
"Interesting choice." She said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Origami." She laughed as she loaded it up.
"Maybe I could dazzle an agent with my paper folding skillz and then give him a very nasty paper cut." I joked.
"You never know. Combat training comes next." And so it went. She finished up a few hours later and was about to unplug me when I stopped her.
"You have any driving programs in there? And include bike riding with it." I asked.
"Ballard told me that you were a pretty decent driver already. I didn't think you'd need them." She said.
"Knowing all you have about driving can't hurt. You never know when it could come in useful." I told her.
"Okay, the last one who had these loaded into them was Zan and that was three years ago. There here somewhere." She dug through her boxes of discs until she found the right ones.
"That's all the programs you have?" I asked before she loaded it in.
"No, but Ballard usually wants to split it into two sessions. It can be very tiring. Here we go." She put the disc in and suddenly I knew more about cars and bikes than I ever had before.
"And we are done for the day. Let's go get some food." She said. She pulled the spike out of my head and helped me up, steadying me as I stumbled. After I finished eating I went back to the bare room and went to sleep.