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Chapter 7: Defying Gravity

My eyes shot open, breathless, and I looked over at Hannah from my chair. She returned the wide-eyed stare as we registered what had just happened.

Morpheus looked at us with a knowing smile creeping onto his lips. Hannah stuttered for a few seconds before managing to ask how many friggin' martial arts he had just loaded into our minds. He ejected the disc and simply said,

"Enough."

I put my hand to my head, not just out of habit but to make sure it was still there. We had been to some pretty intense ninjutsu sessions before, but that was insane.

There was a pause as we ran over a handful of the kick-ass moves we were now capable of.

"Can we try it?" I asked, somewhat apprehensively. Morpheus hit a few keys.

"Please do."

OoOoO

We looked around. The programme into which we had been loaded was clearly designed for martial arts training; the room we were in was a large, light dojo in traditional Japanese style. We looked at each other, then around the dojo, then at each other again.

Right on cue, Morpheus appeared behind us in a black gi.

"Welcome to the Sparring Programme."

His clothes prompted us to look down at ourselves; we found we were suddenly wearing gis too – mine black and Hannah's red. We exchanged glances and grinned.

"Cool get-up." Hannah commented.

Morpheus smiled. "You remember what I told you about Residual Self-Image?"

"Yeeaahh…" It took us a moment before we twigged, and our hands flew to the tops of our heads.

"Hair! I have /hair!" Exclaimed Hannah.

"My dreads are back! My gorgeous dreads!"

We squealed like 5-year-olds and resisted the urge to bounce up and down. A /look/ from Morpheus brought us back to earth.

"Sorry," we mumbled, fighting back grins, "we'll behave."

Morpheus rolled his shoulders and rubbed his hands together.

"Now, I think it's time I showed you what I meant about bending rules."

OoOoO

I threw my arms up in a series of blocks as Hannah came powering down on me…from the ceiling. The fun thing about sparring with my twin is that I know exactly what she's going to do next; I was dodging before her knee had even come up, and by the time she had flicked her foot out I was already leaping out of the way – over her head, as it happened. We could get used to defying gravity.

All of a sudden, Morpheus sprung in, and we both turned on him. And I'm telling you now, he was pretty bloody fast. But not fast enough for the both of us put together; it was like we'd been dosed up on valium on our way into the programme; our hands and feet flew in all directions.

After a few minutes even Morpheus couldn't handle us both and we went back to attacking each other. It wasn't 'til much later that we realised the significance of being able to defeat him so quickly.

Soon we were moving so fast I didn't have time to realise what Hannah was about to do next; even she didn't know. She dropped into a floor-sweep and I back-flipped over her leg before I even knew what was happening; the blade of my foot was shooting towards her head before I had told it to leave the floor. This was the best fight we'd ever had, by several miles.

I mean come on, we could bend almost any rule we liked; we weren't always subject to gravity and it appeared to be possible to defy time itself, our bodies moving so fast we just a blur of black and red. It was our first /proper/ fight.

And it wouldn't be the last.

OoOoO

"By the way," Hannah said at breakfast the next morning, "why do you always call us by our hacker names?"

"Mmmmm," I agreed, through a mouthful of 'porridge', "and Tom too. You keep calling him Neo."

Morpheus paused thoughtfully for a moment.

"It's about choice," he said finally. "He chose to be Neo instead of Thomas Anderson when he chose to accept the Real World. The name Thomas Anderson represented his identity within the Matrix. In letting go of that identity he let go of the Matrix."

We nodded, thinking about what he had just said.

"Sooner or later," he continued, "you're going to have to choose."

"Our identity?" I asked.

He looked me straight in the eye. "Are you Sarah Anderson? Or are you Apollo?"