"Illogical to the end," I thought, as my teeth chattered in pure terror. "You don't have any teeth to be chattering."
Chatter they did, though, and it seemed like a million years before those blue eyes released my own gray ones, and the hand released my throat just enough to allow me to speak. I still shook violently.
"Etna," I replied to his question through gritted teeth. "I'm Etna."
He tilted his head curiously at me. I knew exactly what his next question was. "What are you?" he asked, and released me entirely.
Ah, the eternal question, and I've no idea how to answer it. I am not a program, but I am not a human. I am an anomaly. I was once, ages ago, a redpill. Some unlikely accident involving my ship, an experimental type of broadcast, a server farm for the Matrix program, and my jacked-in self resulted in what I am today: the consciousness of a human woman, body long gone, existing somewhere in the billions of terrabytes of hard drive space that contains the Matrix. I don't even know the details of the incident that put me here. Most redpills will tell you I am "impossible", and before I became this way, I'd have agreed with them. Now I'm something no one wants to talk about; I cause uncomfortable silences when jacked-in redpills visit the Oracle and I happen to be lounging in the den with Seraph.
I gave Smith the bare bones explanation. He blinked, processed this information, & appeared to dismiss it. He attempted to sit up, and I got my next surprise of the night: he winced, coughed, and fell back onto the couch.
"What did you do to me?" he demanded.
I raised both hands in a gesture of innocence. "Found you in the alley?" I ventured. He bared his teeth at me, and I jumped. "Do I look like someone who could do this to you?" I gestured at the obvious damage.
"No," Smith replied, and I think it was with relief. It might've been a bit embarrassing to have one's ass handed to him by a highly unintimidating anomaly that looked like a 30-year-old woman. I gritted my teeth at the sudden realization that there was emotion in his voice at all. At least plugged-in agents are predictable. Smith was still rogue. My teeth chattered again. "You know who I am," he stated. It was not a question.
"Yes," I said. "I remember everything."
"I remember it, too," he said, and grimaced again. He was obviously in pain.
"I...um...okay," I said. I steeled myself and started again. "I don't know anything about what's going on or why this happened, but if I give you a painkiller will it help?" He glared at me. "I don't know anything about agents, but you look like you could use a painkiller or two. Or twelve." He didn't answer.
Satisfied he wasn't going anywhere, I brought back the bottle of painkillers & some water. "I don't know how it is for you, but even though I know none of it's real, it still feels that way and this helps." Ignoring the dosing prescription on the label, I spilled 6 pills onto my palm. He tried to move to take them when I offered my open hand, but winced again. I bit the inside of my cheek hard to calm down, and perched on the edge of the couch. Before he could fight me off, I'd popped the pills into his mouth and placed the glass at his lips. Shaking, I tipped the glass and managed to get some of it into his mouth. Enough to swallow the painkillers, anyway. He glared again. His blue eyes made me think of blue lightsabers from the ever-so-popular movie series. I wondered if anyone had ever thought "Ooo, pretty" before a blue lightsaber chopped them in half.
"I don't need them," he spat after he'd swallowed them. I was wiping up the water I'd spilled all over him.
"Looks to me like you do," I said, trying in vain to sound stern. "Do you want to sit up?"
He did, so I helped him up to a seated position on the couch, bolstered by a couple of great, fat pillows. I sat across from him in the recliner and stared at him.
"Why am I here?" he asked angrily. I explained about finding him in the alley and dragging his heavy agent butt into my apartment. Left out the part about the Oracle's visit.
"You know who I am," he said again.
"Yes," I said, and rattled off a "definition" of him as though it were a litany. "The would-be annihilator of the human and machine races. You're Smith--former agent of the Matrix, now apparently rogue program who's seen better days."
"Then why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?" I asked. I wasn't dense, but I did want to see how he "saw" this situation. I leaned back in my chair in a failed attempt to look confident.
"You 'rescued' me, as you saw it. You know who I am and you sit in that chair staring at me as though you aren't afraid."
I laughed--a little, high, shrill sound. "Not afraid. Oh, right. Yep, I'm a picture of stoic courage." I walked to the table, picked up my Chinese, and nibbled off a piece of broccoli. Or tried to, until my chopsticks shook so hard I dropped the broccoli. Giving that up, I turned back toward him and regarded him, sitting back in my chair.
"I don't know," I admitted. "I have been in the Matrix for years now, and I have human traits that do not seem to go away. They're weird and they don't make sense in this world, especially given what I know about it, but they remain. And compassion is one of them."
"Your compassion is misplaced," he sneered.
"The object of compassion isn't the point of compassion." Wow. Sometimes I sound like the Oracle.
He laughed shortly & mirthlessly. "You sound like the Or--"
Both of us startled, we stared at each other. And then I started again: he'd laughed, and he was now startled by something he himself had been about to say. This was a ridiculous range of emotion for someone who was a program designed specifically for defense.
"What happened to you?" I asked. I was surprised at my own boldness. "You are not the way you were."
"How would you know the way I was?" he snapped.
"You copied over me when...hell, man, you copied over EVERYONE." I threw my hands in the air. "For a while, when you fought Neo, I WAS you! Everyone was you."
His eyes, beginning to glaze, widened a bit, remembering. Then he looked at me intently. It's very disconcerting for a scientist to suddenly feel like the rat in the maze. His eyes narrowed and he appeared to come to a conclusion.
"You do not stink," he pronounced, and the painkillers got the better of him, to my immense surprise.