Come on Devil wake up.
I could hear a voice inside my head. Then I realised that voice was my own.
Get up you bitch. Move.
I had the feeling of being submerged in a warm bath. I felt so safe and secure but I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to hurl. I pushed so hard against the water and finally I broke through. I pulled a tube out of my mouth and vomited various coloured fluids.
'Oh gross' I wanted to say. But my mouth or my vocal cords didn't seem to be working. I looked at where I was. I was sitting completely butt naked in a pool of red liquid that looked suspiciously like amniotic fluid. Attached to my arms and legs were black tubes, almost exactly the same as the one that I pulled out of my mouth. I reached around to the back of my head and to my sheer horror there was a plug which I'm pretty sure would not have been a good idea to try and pull out myself.
The next thing I knew a machine swooped down and grabbed me. I could feel the plug being unscrewed which felt incredibly painful and odd at the same time. When the machine had finished its work it dropped me. I thought the worse was over.
How could I be more wrong?
The plugs on my body started popping off me. Well to put it mildly. The fluid in the tub drained out and I slid out alone with it down a tunnel. Kind of like a water slide but nowhere near as fun.
I landed in a pool of icy water. I tried to tread water but my legs gave out on me. I saw a light above me. It was the last thing I remembered before I lost consciousness again.
"Well it looks like she made it." I could hear a woman's voice above me.
"She looks so fragile." A man said. Ghost? Could that be his voice?
"I know but once we fix her up she'll be as good as new."
The first thing I noticed besides the voices was the cool metal underneath my skin. My eyes were stinging from the light. A warm hand held my own. I looked up. It was Ghost.
"Welcome to the real world." I could hear.
"I… don't… understand." A shaky voice that didn't seem my own called out.
"You will. Just rest for now. Then again for the third time ever I passed out…
How annoying.
For the next few days everything was a blur as I kept slipping in and out of consciousness. At one point I awoke to see hundreds of needles sticking out of me.
"What are you doing to me?" I asked weakly.
The woman with dark hair and skin looked at me. "While you were plugged into the Matrix your muscles wasted away from lack of use. We're rebuilding them."
"Oh." I said and fell asleep.
I woke up some time later in a room fully clothed and by myself. I caught sight of myself in piece of glass. My hair, my one redeeming feature was gone. In its place was one-week-old regrowth. Shit. A syringe was attached to a hole in my arm. I pulled it out, wincing as I did so.
"Ouch." I muttered. My eyes had stopped stinging at least. And in place of my lanky arms and legs I had fully toned rippling muscles. Well if I was going for the G.I Jane look I might as well look like I could kick someone's ass.
The door opened. The woman who had been attending to me during my weird mind trip stepped inside.
"Good morning." She greeted me. "The name's Niobe. It's Devil right?"
I nodded. "What's happening to me? Where am I?"
"Well we're not entirely sure where on the Earth we are but we do know that the year is around 2199 or at least close to it."
"What do you mean?"
"Come on." She started to leave. "Morpheus can explain it better than I can."
She led me to the deck. "This is my ship the Logos. It's a hovercraft. This is my crew Ghost and Sparks. You probably won't be staying on this ship though. There's not a lot of room." She pointed to Morpheus. "His ship is the Nebuchanezza. But he's just overseeing your initiation into our ranks."
As the day went on I learnt the truth about the world I had lived in. Everything I had ever done was a lie. My life had never existed at all. It's kind of depressing when you think about it
(I'm not going to write out the whole matrix explanation. If you haven't seen the movie and have no idea what I'm talking about you shouldn't be reading this).
That night I was taken to their city Zion. I was to be transferred to another crew to do God knows what. God. That's an interesting topic. Why did he let this happen to us? Why couldn't we be saved? I had believed there was a god since I was old enough to understand the concept. Somehow I didn't believe it anymore. My whole life was a lie. Apparently so were my beliefs.
Figures…
I hardly slept in the next few days. To be honest I was shell-shocked. I barely ate at all. I couldn't deal with it. The struggles I had dealt with in the matrix had only happened on a sub conscious level. I didn't know what to do next. The only thing that kept me from going mental was use of the construct in the control centre where I was being trained. I learnt how to fight, how to drive all sorts of vehicles and handle all types of weaponry. Other times I would program the construct for the Hindu temple that I used to go to for meditation. I felt so calm there. I was alone most of the time. It didn't bother me though.
Although one day while I sat on the steps of my Hindu temple on top of a mountain range I heard a familiar voice behind me.
"Hello Devil." Ghost said.
"Hello Ghost. Did you come here for the views too?"
"Well no but Zion can get a little boring to look at sometimes so this is a refreshing change. What I really came here to do is to check on you. How are you dealing?"
"I don't know. It's kind of hard for me to accept that my life never really happened. There's all these memories in my head that…" I trailed off, feeling incredibly depressed.
"I understand."
"How long have you been here for?"
"Six years."
"What were you doing before you were freed?"
"To be honest I don't really remember much about my life in the matrix." He sat down beside me. "Once I had accepted that my memories didn't really happen I let them go and built a new identity for myself."
"Do you think that there are people that miss you when you left?"
"No. There weren't very many people in the matrix that I could say that I counted as family or friends. Most people who are freed are like that. It's a sort of side effect that comes from rejecting the system. You were a hacker. One of Morpheus' crew Trinity was a very famous hacker. She was the one who cracked the IRS D Base.
"Trinity is a girl?"
"Yeah. She's very much a girl." His voice held a hint of sadness when he was talking about her.
Hmm better not go there. Not my business. I looked out in the space.
"Do you know why I was called Devil?"
Ghost shook his head.
I laughed. "I thought it would be obvious to most people. My word was described by the people in most hacker circles as the 'ultimate demonic presence of the virtual world', in other words the Devil. So from that point onwards I called myself that. It seemed to suit not only my work but also my personality itself."
"Interesting." He stood up. "I supposed to tell you that we're having a council meeting later to appoint you to a crew."
"Oh."
"You don't sound too excited."
"I'm just still dealing with everything that's all. I haven't slept too well in the last few days."
"That's understandable. But you'll be fine soon. I guarantee it."
"Where's this meeting gonna be?"
"In the council chambers."
"I don't know where that is."
"Come on I'll show you."
We walked down the long corridors of Zion. I hadn't been here long so I still got lost quite easily. I knew how to get to my room, the gardens and the training centre but other than that I was as lost as hell. One time I had spent three hours trying to get to the mess hall for breakfast.
"Here we are."
He pushed open the huge doors that looked as if the metal had been carved out. It was one of the more beautiful things about the city. The crews for each of the ships had started gathering. I recognised Niobe, Sparks, Morpheus, Trinity, Roland, Soren and Axel (who was seriously spunky I thought) but that was it.
Eventually everyone else arrived and the meeting begun. They started with a prayer and then orders of business. Reports on sentinel activity, how many had been freed and talk of the One. I didn't know much about the One, just that he or she was supposed to be incredibly powerful and hadn't been found yet.
Finally they got to me.
"I hereby appoint Devil to the crew of the Vigilant under the command of Captain Soren." Someone announced. People applauded. Soren stood up and walked over to me. He extended his hand to me. I took it and we walked to the centre of the room.
"Do you swear to serve me and the crew of the Vigilant to the best of your abilities?"
"I do."
"Do you swear to do anything and everything necessary to help us in our struggle?"
"I do."
"I hereby swear you in as an assassin for the crew of the Vigilant. Congratulations Devil." We shook hands and embraced to conclude the initiation.
Everybody applauded. I turned towards the group and saw Axel smiling at me. God he was cute. I smiled back at him. Working for Soren was going to be fun.
That night there was a small celebration with my new crew. Besides Soren and Axel there was Binary, Vector and Jax the operator. Axel and I fell easily into conversation. He seemed so adorable with the light brown mop of messy hair falling over his face.
"So how long you have been here for?" I asked him.
Axel shrugged. "About a year now. It seems so long ago that I came though. You getting used to this?"
"Yeah. It's kind of odd waking up here and not in the Matrix but I'm adjusting slowly."
"Tell me about it. For a while I used to wake not knowing where I was."
I laughed. I felt so happy having someone to talk to. It made me feel normal again.
"So do you know many people here yet?" He asked me. "Oh shit what a stupid question. Of course you wouldn't. I'm sorry. Sometimes I get nervous around… people."
"I'm sorry if I make you nervous. I must look like someone straight out of boot camp with this hair."
"Nah. Actually you won't look like that for too long. Around here hair grows surprisingly fast for the pod borns. I'm not sure why but Soren reckons its got something to do with the way we're designed. We can regenerate a little bit faster than those born naturally."
"Really?"
"Apparently so."
"Did someone say my name?" Soren yelled out from the other side of our table.
"I just said how much I loved you Soren." Axel said grinning. "I want to marry you and ride off on the Vigilant into the… well there's no sunset. Into the smog"
"I'm sorry but he's mine bitch." Binary said with mock anger. "Hands off."
I watched with glee and Axel and Binary parodied a bitch fight with Binary as the winner. No matter how grey things seemed to get they always knew how to pick themselves up again. Something I would learn over the next year.