The Kimmatrix: Matrix Shutdown
A Fan Fiction Fusion By
Classic Cowboy and Turles
Chapter 1: Black and White
"A bad beginning makes a bad ending."
- Euripides
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"What are the reports so far?" Captain Steve "Kid" Barkin asked his crewmate Brick "Tater Salad" Flagg as he continued to pilot his hover-ship, the Mad Dog, through the dark and debris filled tunnels that lay deep beneath the Earth's surface.
The Mad Dog was flying in stealth mode, or to be more accurate, flying on as few pads as possible so as not to draw attention to themselves and bring about the Omega Sentinels.
It was hard to believe for the crew of the Mad Dog, along with the refugees that were still on board, that only two weeks had passed since the fall of Neo Zion. It was just like the death of someone close, but the pain was felt by everyone, and what made the pain worse was that with Neo Zion gone, a great question lingered over the crew and refugees of the Mad Dog. That question being: what do we do now?
"So far, most of the ships have reported in," Brick 'Tater Salad' Flagg reported to Captain Barkin, "Seems most made it out before Neo Zion went up. The only ships that have not reported in are the Numbers, Goliath, Balthazar, and the…the…The Nebuchadnezzar Two."
Ron "Neo" Stoppable heard that last name and got up out of his seat, headed for the door of the bridge. Thinking that the Neb Two was gone was too much to deal with along with the loss of Neo Zion. Not just because of Morpheus, Niobe, Ghost, or Link, but because of his wife…Kim "Angel" Stoppable.
"I'm sure they made it out alright, Stoppable," Captain Barkin tried to comfort Ron in a way that was not like him at all. Not like the Barkin that Ron knew in the halls of Middleton High, but as "the Kid" that Neo had saved all those years ago…or as Neo had put it, he saved himself, "Morpheus is way too stubborn to go out that way, and your wife ain't 'bout to let you be a widow."
"Thanks," Ron answered weakly as he stepped out the door and looked out at the refugees sitting on the floor of the Mad Dog's interior. Every one of them had laid down their hand made blankets of dirty colors while others had wrapped themselves up to protect them from the cold of the night. As Ron walked, some of the refugees looked up at him, silently asking their savior what he was going to do or why he couldn't stop the sentinels from destroying Neo Zion. That was when the very real fact came down on Ron's shoulders that, even with all of his powers in the Matrix, he was still human, a small human who couldn't even save one city. He never wanted to cry more in his life, but in that moment of perpetual despair in his head and the eyes of the Zion refugees, he had a thought. What would Kim do? That's when he came up with an idea; he went back to the bridge and looked at his shipmates.
"Are we at broadcast depth?" he asked.
"Sure," Barkin answered, "Just got there ten minutes ago, but why?"
"Log me in," Ron stated to the crew, "I think I can speak to the Architect or the Oracle and find out what's going on."
"You know we're not cleared to enter the Matrix, now that the war is back on," Barkin tried to reason with the boy, "It's suicide to go in now."
"I want to talk to them," Ron stated to Barkin coldly as if he was saying that he was going in with or without anyone's help.
"Okay…" Barkin had finally caved in to Ron's ludicrous request, "I'll set us down and you can have a few words, but we can't stay long."
"I'll only need a few minutes," Ron had reassured the Mad Dog crew before he leapt out the door, over the refugees, and to the jack chamber.
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The skies in the Matrix were clear and sunny as Ron "Neo" Stoppable flew through them with the grace of an ice skater. He was high above the city, using his Anomaly abilities to part the clouds so he could look for the capital building. Knowing that the clock was ticking, it didn't take him very long to find it, and he was off with the speed of an errant thought to the concrete front steps of the building. The force with which he landed sent pieces of concrete flying in each direction like shrapnel from a grenade.
He wasted no time when he came to the glass paned doors of the building. He just shoved his hand outward and sent the doors flying off their hinges straight into the lobby itself. With the way cleared, Ron stepped in, and the army of security guards circled around, like vultures ready to scavenge.
"Stop him!" One of the security guards shouted.
"Freeze!" Another guard shouted as he and the multitude of security guards and S.W.A.T. team members pointed and cocked their guns at him.
"No," Ron answered back rather sarcastically.
No other encouragement was needed for the guards to open fire on Ron, and as they did, he held up his hand, and like flies to fly paper, the bullets stopped in mid-air. They kept coming until the guards had run out of ammunition, but not one came any closer than Ron wanted. Normally, Ron would have just allowed the bullets to fall to the ground, but he was pissed, and thought that what he was about to do was as good a way as any to blow off steam. The fire that burned in him from the loss of Neo Zion, the Neb Two, and especially Kim made him make the bullets and the shotgun pellets to turn on their axes and fly back at the guards and S.W.A.T. team members, sending every one of them falling over or flying backward until the One had nothing standing in his way, except the wait for the elevator.
Even the wait annoyed Ron so much that he decided to take an alternate route. He squatted downward, making the linoleum floor beneath his feet ripple before rocketing upwards through the ceiling, breaking through the concrete, wood, steel, and carpet as if they were cardboard. With each layer he broke through, he counted until he reached the thirteenth floor. There he stopped himself, floating over the hole that he had just created before gently setting himself down on the floor.
He again wasted no time in getting to the Architect's room, not even bothering to open the door in the conventional sense, such pleasantries were lost to him now; he reached up and with his foot and kicked the door open. It flew off its hinges like the front doors of the capital building, of course Ron could have just commanded it to happen, but he was just so pissed off, and kicking the door open was a form of release.
He walked into the wall-to-wall television screened room, neither noticing nor caring that his was the face plastered on every screen in the room, only caring about finding the program designed to look like an old man resembling Colonel Sanders. The Architect was in his usual place, seated at the center in his usual white suit with his pen in hand.
"I had a feeling you'd be back sooner or later," The Architect stated dryly.
"We need to talk," Ron growled as his anger, frustration, and hatred boiled to the surface.
"We have nothing to discuss," The Architect told him before reaching his finger up to tap the side of his pen, while the multitude of television screens played and replayed the destruction of Neo Zion. Every single one of them starting and stopping at random times as if each screen was a memory of one of the many refugees who witnessed its destruction. "It's over. You lost your battle and thus the war is over before it began. The Age of Man and the Age of the Matrix have ended. There is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it."
Ron looked down at the Architect with such hatred and contempt for his arrogance. He squinted from behind his sunglasses at the number of television screens around him. The screens faded from their visage of Ron repeated in the background to a pure white screen. That was when they exploded, the shards of the thousands of glass screens flying out at both Ron, who was standing there as if nothing had happened, and the Architect, who was trying to cover himself for fear of injury in the most human of ways. All the while, Ron stood there, unmoved by what he was experiencing, and not even covering himself from the pieces of flying glass. The second that the debris had settled, the white light that had permeated from the floor and the ceiling had turned to a dark green similar to that of the Matrix code. The Architect then looked at Ron, very surprised by what had just occurred.
"Did you…" he asked, he started to ask, then stopped and restarted, "How did you do that? You shouldn't have any ability in this chamber?"
"I thought you would know what we are," Ron stated, his voice along with the voices of six other people speaking at once as if their minds had been linked to one but given six vocal chords.
The Architect's beady, blue eyes widened with the very emotion that the machines always had about the human race, but disguised it through their own logical actions: fear. Yes, the Architect was filled with fear by what he was seeing and hearing with his own senses while his mind tried to comprehend how in all the equations of the Matrix it was possible. That was when it had occurred to him what he told Neo and his five predecessors: the anomaly is systemic, causing imbalance in the most simplistic of equations.
"I think," Ron continued as his voice (or voices) came back to one; his, "that mankind's chances are greater than you expect, but I want to know why. Why do all this? Why now?"
"Why?" The Architect asked Ron; he closed his eyes and held them shut for a full five seconds before opening them back up again. His eyes then revealed how they had changed color from that pale blue to a hazel green that Ron had seen before, but it didn't stop there.
"Why not?" The Architect had asked; his voice had also changed with his eyes, a voice that Ron had heard before, but he had to be sure.
"Why not?" Ron asked, his voice cracking from how dry it had been from his shock about what he had witnessed.
"Indeed, why not?" The Architect asked, his voice still sounding different, but it also seemed to sound gruff, as Ron discovered an accentuation of his sounds, "You humans…, regardless of any religion, and in every part of the world, have constantly looked for the end of your world at the hand of specific gods per civilization. With the sky almost cleared from the damage you have done to it…we…no longer require you as a source of power, ergo, we will give you all what you have wanted from the beginning of your first civilization: you have the Alpha and we will provide the Omega."
"You will have to kill me first," Ron stated proudly, knowing that with what the machines had done, there wouldn't be very much to lose, "and I will not make it easy."
"Apropos," The Architect stated with the most sinister of smiles that Ron had seen on that constantly neutral look he had, "That is entirely the sole purpose of reactivating the program Smith."
"What?" Ron asked about this new development.
"Do you not understand?" The architect asked, standing up from his leather chair and dropping his pen to the dark green floor, all the while, his suit was starting to change color from white to black. It had changed much in the same way as ink when it spills onto blank white paper, bleeding into it. At the same time, the Architect grew a few inches taller and his face was starting to change, becoming younger with the loss of his white hair and beard. "Do you know that even though a system has multiple parts, the core system is usually merely several parts of a whole, while some programs exist to themselves? Such are the Trainman, the Key maker, the Merovingian, the Oracle, and so on, but the core is one…in the same…we are all simply…"
Ron had watched in stunted horror as the Architect had completed his transformation, and in the dark green light Ron watched the face as the hair darkened, the beard receded, and the forehead wrinkled. By that point, the new form had reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses and slipped them over his eyes.
"Me," The fully transformed Architect smiled sinisterly at Ron.
"Smith…" Ron snarled, with narrow eyes behind his sunglasses while he took a step back from the transformed program.
"Got it in one," Smith chimed as he congratulated Ron with his thick sarcasm, "Very good, Mister Stoppable. So tell me, how is the misses? Is she well? How about my old friend Morpheus?"
"You've been the Architect this whole time," Ron had deduced, hoping that Smith would hear the hatred he had in his voice for him.
"That hurts, Mister Stoppable," Smith frowned at Ron, "I merely wanted to talk a bit and you are blowing me off. That is quite rude even for you," Smith grinned at the boy, "but the answer is no. I wasn't the Architect, but it's amazing really…" he marveled at his own hands, thinking about he did it, "Assimilate one core program and I'm in…the…whole…damn system! How cool is that?"
"What do you want, Smith?" Ron demanded.
"What do I want?" Smith repeated, but then, like a philosopher pondering the meaning of existence, asked "What does anyone want? What do you want, Mister Stoppable? Kim Possible? Popularity? Power? To be the smiling sidekick again? What do you really want?"
"I asked you first," Ron answered back quickly.
"The answers are the same, Mister Stoppable," Smith stated while still smiling as sinister as he could be, "Have you forgotten that I am a part of you that was stripped away? We are the yin and yang, if you will, two sides of a coin that was chopped in half. I only want what you have always wanted. Though I do wonder why this urge to be with KP is still so strong, seeing how she treated us, or have you forgotten it since she started sleeping with you and took your last name?"
"Then why are you killing everybody?" Ron had asked with sincerity as if he was pleading for the lives of the entire human race, "I don't want that."
"But you do with for everyone around you to be happy, do you not, Mister Stoppable?" Smith had asked, trying to dig down deeper into the very core of Ron, "That's what I'm working towards."
Smith had then turned to Ron's right, to the door that was unopened. He was already a step away from it when he had stopped. He just stood there, not reaching for the door handle or making any single motion or action until:
"Just imagine it, Mister Stoppable," Smith began to wax like an idealist thinking of a bright and shining future, "everyone in perfect harmony…everyone a part of me."
Smith had reached for the door handle.
"Wait," Ron had stopped him, "We're not finished yet!"
"You're right," Smith agreed as he gripped the door knob, turned it, and opened it revealing only black emptiness beyond, "We are not finished yet, but we will finish our…discussion later…by the way…good luck in finding KP, Mister Stoppable."
It was that when Smith had stepped through the door and closed it behind him. For a small instant, Ron wanted to follow him to wherever he was going, but he stopped himself. It was because he thought to himself that there were bigger things to take care of and Ron knew exactly where those very important things were.
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It was night, and in the clouds over the city of Middleton, Ron "Neo" Stoppable flew above them, all of them splitting and parting like a snow blower on a black road. Once again, he pulled himself up to twirl around and, from his eagle's eye point of view, find his destination. With the target locked, Ron rocketed from his place above the clouds down through the sky above Middleton, down to the driveway of the Possible family home.
Quickly he stood back up from his squatting position that he took when he landed. He looked around, hoping he'd find some signs that Kim would be anywhere in that neighborhood, but there were no cars going by, no kids playing in the streets, and most of all, no signs of Kim. Ron couldn't even see the black sedan that Morpheus loved to use to travel around the Matrix. Never had he felt so terribly alone in his life, but seeing no tells of the Neb II crew around, Ron decided to go into the house.
Oddly enough, the front door wasn't locked, and sensing no real danger, Ron walked inside. He came into the family room looking around to see that there was still not a single person to be found.
"KP?" Ron called, "You here?" He had called for Kim, much in the same way that a child does when their parents are missing or nowhere to be found at home. There was no answer, but Ron didn't exactly expect one; that would have been a real miracle if he had ever seen one, either inside or out.
Ron's vision had turned to the mantle over the fireplace where the Possible Family pictures lay in their unique frames. He came up to it and looked at each picture with the same nostalgia as someone looking through an old photo album and thinking about how good those old days were. Until his eyes came to one particular picture, it was a Christmas card from the year before with all the members of the Possible Family (including Ron) on it. There was Grandma Possible, Jim, Tim, Kim, and Mister and Misses Possible. As Ron looked at the picture and at how happy they all were he kept looking at the line on it, "Have a very Possible Christmas." He clanked from face to face, first to Kim, to his own, and then to the Possible parents and that was when their last words resonated deeply within Ron.
"Ron…take…care…of Kim," Misses Possible had told Ron that, and it replayed over and over again in Ron's mind like a scratched CD that was skipping.
"I promise," Ron whispered to the picture, hoping to the very pit of his breaking heart that the Possible parents would hear him, wherever they were. He laid his fingers over the picture while his tears dripped onto his hand as well as the picture itself, "I'll find her, and I'll take care of her…just like I told you…even if it kills me."
His eyes looked to the faces of Jim and Tim who looked as happy as ever, and probably were planning their own tom-fooleries while the picture was being taken. Seeing their faces had reminded why Ron had come to the Possible family home. He set the picture back onto the mantle before turning to the stairs and heading up to one of the bedrooms there.
He turned to the first door and walked into the bedroom of Jim and Tim Possible, the first thing that greeted his eye was the bunk bed that the twins had slept in and the two of them had woken up. They sat up together and rubbed their eyes together with the same motions and choreography as synchronized swimmers.
"Ron?" Tim asked half asleep.
"What're you doing here?" Jim continued, "Where are mom, dad, and Kim?"
"And what're you wearing?" Tim finished.
"I can't explain it all now," Ron answered as he raised his hand to the twins, "But I can tell you that you guys can't stay here alone."
His hand up, Ron watched, expecting to see what happened next, with the same synchronization, the twins' eyes rolled into the backs of their heads, and they fell back onto the bed. Ron twisted his hand so the palm was facing up, and watched as the twins rose up out of their beds and floated closer to Ron. He was like a magician performing tricks for his own amusement as he made the unconscious bodies of Jim and Tim follow him down the stairs, out the front door, and into the skies over Middleton to the only safe place that Ron knew.
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"Ronald Stoppable!" Misses Stoppable barked as Ron came through the front door.
Ron was carrying the twins over each of his shoulders as he carefully walked up the stairs to his old bedroom, while his mom continued to bark in the way all parents do. To him, though, it felt quite odd since it had been so long since he had been home. Of course, he made calls from outside the Matrix to his home to let his parents know that he was alright. Still, with the events of two weeks ago, Ron knew that his parents would want a very good explanation about what was going on, but first things first. He set the twins into his bed side by side with their backs facing each other, and while Ron tucked them in, his mother continued to rant and rave about how Ron should have done this, that, or the other. With the twins in bed, Ron had headed back down to face the proverbial music from his mother.
"Where have you been?" She kept on going with her rant never noticing that Ron wasn't staying to listen, "Why haven't you called, young man? And what are you wearing?"
"It's a long story, mom," Ron had explained briefly, but then gave his requesting instructions, "please, take care of Jim and Tim."
Ron turned and was about to head out the door, but he was quickly blocked by his mother. Even though his mom hadn't reached the age yet, she was a master at what some may call "The Jewish Mother Act", at least in her own way. Some mothers used guilt and others used the tactic that Misses Stoppable was using: fear. She looked down at Ron with an icy stare that froze Ron's insides; in comparison Ron would rather face a thousand Smiths than endure…the look.
"Oh no you don't, young man," Misses Stoppable had given her ultimatum when she looked at Ron, and then to the couch where Mister Stoppable sat watching the events unfold. She brought her attention to her son and continued her ultimatum, "You're not leaving this house at this hour of night dressed like…like…that!"
"I can't tell you, mom," Ron tried to explain as he took off his sunglasses to look at his mother and father with such sincerity and honesty, "You wouldn't believe me if I had told you. There's no easy way to do this, so I'm asking you to trust me, because a lot is at stake."
Misses Stoppable looked into her son's chocolate brown eyes and she saw that he had changed in some fundamental as well as indefinable way. It was the kind of thing that a mother could sense in her son; he didn't seem as goofy as he was six months ago. She began to wonder what kinds of changes could have happened to her son while he was out with Kim Possible. Still, seeing that longing look in his eyes, she began to rethink her decision, but she had to ask.
"What kind of trouble did you get into, son?" Misses Stoppable had asked in that concern that a mother usually has.
"It's big, mom," Ron had explained while his father got off of the couch and came closer to his son, "It's really, really big. It's bigger than anything that Kim and I have ever been involved in, and it could mean…everyone…and everything."
Misses Stoppable reached out and placed her hands at Ron's shoulders and locked eyes with her son.
"Ronald…" She spoke softly, "I had a feeling that wherever you were, you and Kim would watch each other's backs, but please…please…be careful, son."
Ron smiled back at his mother and turned his gaze to his father who also gave that same comforting smile. He then turned his gaze to his mother.
"We'll watch the boys, but please be careful," Misses Stoppable had repeated herself, hoping that her concerns would resonate with Ron, "Do what you have to do, but come back to us, okay son?"
Ron slipped his sunglasses back on his face.
"I'll do what I can, mom," Ron smiled at his mom as she looked at his parents from behind his sunglasses.
Misses Stoppable had stepped aside to let Ron have access to the front door as if telling him silently along with her verbal blessing that he could go. Ron gave his parents one quick glance before he spread out his arms and wrapped them around his mother and father in one last embrace. He then broke the embrace and headed to the door, but as he reached out for the door handle, he suddenly remembered a very important fact about Kim that he had to tell them. He smiled as he looked back to his parents with his hand still on the door knob.
"By the way," he smirked at his parents, "you two should know, Kim and I…we got married."
He walked out the door with only that little piece of information hanging over the Stoppable parents' heads. The two of them looked at each other with the very questions in mind that had leaked out of their mouths.
"Did he…s-say…the…the M-word?" Misses Stoppable had stammered as she came to grips with what her son had just told her.
"Yes, dear," Mister Stoppable gulped, "He did."
"Oh my goodness…" Misses Stoppable blinked, the color fading from her face, and her hand at her mouth from the shock, "I have a daughter-in-law…"
With that final revelation, Misses Stoppable's eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she fainted into her husbands arms.
To be continued…