He slept like a log, needless to say. Slept, I say, but as he's a program I suppose he recompiled or rebooted or something very technical like that. Not everyone who gets unplugged from the Matrix is a hacker. Some of us became potentials simply because our brains didn't work like everyone else's, no matter what our field was. Some of us were simply unplugged so very long ago that we came before the time the "hacker test" was in widespread use. I was one of those. I had no idea what a program was doing when he "slept".

Anyway, whatever he was doing left him unconscious to my eyes. I say I keep human habits & tendencies, and usually sleep is one of them. On the other hand, it's not really detrimental to me when I have to go without it, and I couldn't have slept that night if you'd taken a brick to my forehead. I finished removing what was left of his shirt and decided I did not want to explain to this particular program that I'd removed his pants. I wanted to keep my spleen, so he got to keep those. After a little more help from a wet towel, there was nothing left to do but lay him back down and drape a blanket over him. So while I kept an all night vigil, he slept. I watched the clock tick past 10pm, midnight, and onward through the morning hours. I did a lot of thinking and a lot of staring. At some point, Seraph came by with a bundle of stuff from the Oracle. I don't remember what time, and barely registered he'd been there.

He looked so normal. He looked like every businessman you pass on the street. I supposed that was the point. When he'd been created, he was supposed to be an icy, emotionless construct. Even then, it's said he showed more "emotion" than other agent models of the time. When I'd been him there had been an unnatural cyclone of something in his head. Uncontrolled gales of contradictory emotions. I suppose if he was human, you'd have called it a mental imbalance. He was a program, though, so no one knew quite what to call it.

No sign of it now, given our earlier conversation. Confusion yes, but not that horrifying, intense hatred and the terrible determination and the simultaneous longing and fear for everything to just end. I shivered, remembering the longing and fear. Was that all still there? When he woke up, was he going to start all over again? I kept thinking.

He woke up a little after 6am. He yawned. I raised an eyebrow at his startled expression. "I yawned," he told me. This was a question.

"Yes, you did," I said, mystified as he was. "I didn't know what else to do, so I made you breakfast." I pushed a plate of buttered toast & strawberry jam at him. Without a clue what an agent would want to eat, I figured my favorite would do as well as anything.

"I don't ea--" he began, and stared at the plate. To my astonishment and his, he picked up a piece of toast and took a bite. I made the toast, but I hadn't expected him to eat it. He chewed carefully, swallowed, and looked at me. I wondered if his eyes were ever going to stop being so damned unnerving. Right now they looked surprised and curious.

"...well?" I asked, apprehensively. Surprise and curiosity were not part of the maelstrom I remembered.

"It's...pleasant," he said in stunned disbelief. He stared at the toast as though it had insulted him. Then he took another bite.

Smith, would-be Destroyer of Worlds, sat on my couch and ate 6 pieces of toast as fast as I could make them.

As he sat & stared at me, wordlessly asking for answers, I realized I wasn't quite as terrified of him as I had been. He just seemed so human. Ridiculous notion that it was, it gave me a level of comfort, and I had something of an epiphany: was he really so different from me? He was a program who felt emotion because he had been corrupted; I was a "program" who felt emotion because I'd once been human. I sat back down in my chair and laid it out for him.

"All right, Smith. I have no idea what's going on, but it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, I have a little better grasp of this situation than you do." He frowned and opened his mouth, but I plowed on. If I stopped now I might lose my nerve. "It isn't the same situation, but I do have a bit of experience with being dumped unceremoniously into the Matrix, not knowing what's going on. So I am going to treat you as though you're another anomaly, which obviously you are."

He blinked & nodded. I was smugly satisfied, even though I knew he was really still registering astonishment at having eaten. Like a human.

"So do you think you could get up & around enough to change clothes? Yours are in a bad way," I pointed out.

He nodded and looked vaguely surprised to find himself shirtless. "Vaguely surprised" was beginning to seem like his default setting.

I led him into the bathroom & handed him what Seraph had brought by. I stepped into the hallway & closed the door. There were a few rustling sounds, then silence, and then the tap turned on. Then off. Then on again & stayed on. For an unnaturally long time. I shifted from foot to foot, disconcerted, and finally knocked on the door. "Um, Smith?"

The door flew open. He had one hand on the door he'd just opened and the other under the running water of the tap. He was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, and staring at the hand in the sink as though it might bite him. He certainly wore this just as nicely as his suit; I viciously derailed that train of thought. For the thousandth time that morning, my eyebrows climbed into my hairline. Other than having NO idea what he was doing, the sight of him in regular clothes was...had I really thought last night that he looked "normal"? I found myself wishing the Architect or whoever had created short, balding, stodgy looking agents instead. They'd be less intimidating, but certainly less distracting. Then again, he looked pretty distracted right now, himself. By the tap?

He looked at me as though asking for an explanation. "It feels different."

"What, the water?" I asked.

"Yes," he answered, and wriggled his fingers in the stream. "I could feel it before, but it didn't feel like this." He turned off the tap & plucked at his shirt. "This feels different, too." His eyes were beginning to take on a bit of a wild look.

I stepped forward, grabbing the hand towel off the cabinet & wrapping it around his hands. In this case, I actually knew how he felt. "Yeah, it does. I know."

That brought him up short. "How do you know?" Curiosity now replaced the wild look.

"Happened to me, too," I said. "After...whatever happened, happened...I was here and I knew I was ONLY here. Suddenly everything was different." He actually let me dry his hands, and I replaced the towel on the towel hook. "I wasn't able to see the code before, but I can now. I feel the water & I see the code that makes it." He nodded (nodded!) and kept staring at me as though I should keep going. "I guess it's the opposite for you, isn't it?" I looked up at him and he was still nodding, though he was looking through me instead of at me. "Come on," I said, & took him by the hand to haul him back into the living area. Still dazed, he let me.

I sat him at the kitchen table & started doing my dishes. There weren't many, but Smith had started to feel less like a threat & more like a houseguest, and some weird part of me didn't want the dishes in the sink. Inwardly I rolled my eyes at myself.

It was quiet except for the clinking of my dishes & the swish of the water. I didn't like the idea of Smith sitting there, thinking in the quiet. History seemed to show that Smith was dangerous when left on his own to think. "Last night you said something odd," I said, half-glancing over my shoulder. Smith was looking at me so intently it made my mouth go dry. Shaking it off, I continued. "You said I 'didn't stink', before you fell asleep."

"I don't sleep."

"You don't eat either. Except for toast with jam." It just slipped out.

He scowled and made an attempt to look scary and stoic. Somehow it didn't seem the same as it had the night before. He answered me grudgingly. "Humans have a smell; a stink. You don't have it," he said simply.

Well, what do you say to that? "...thanks," I said, drying the last glass.

"It's possibly because you are not human."

I ground my teeth. "Yeah. It could be that."

"Why do you react that way?"

I opened my mouth to make a sharp retort, except I didn't have one. I don't exactly think on my feet very well. Witty repartee remains the domain of Mr. Smith. I thought I'd resort to honesty. "I have had a very long time to try & understand that I'm...code. I comprehend it, but I don't like it."

"What's the purpose of having a preference about something you cannot change?" he asked me. It wasn't malicious; he really did seem to want my answer to the question.

Again, he had me at a loss. I stood there, my back to the sink, staring silently at him. He just sat there, looking back, and let me think. "As I see it, preferences don't have a 'purpose', per se. They simply exist."

"Existence without purpose," he echoed. "I believe that describes me."

"Me, too," I told him, and sat down across from him at the table. I propped my chin in my hands & looked at the most dangerous program in existence. He looked back at me.

"Oh, I'm not sure that's how I'd describe either one of you."

Both Smith and I whirled toward the door to see the smiling Oracle, who was calmly regarding us from the doorway.